After working with traditional CMSs, headless platforms, static site generators, and custom SSR architectures, we kept running into the same friction points.

The tools were either flexible but fragmented, or simple but limiting once content and rendering logic became tightly coupled.

Ekit started as an attempt to reduce that friction by rethinking how content, rendering, and developer experience fit together.

The problem Ekit is trying to solve

In many architectures, content, rendering logic, and developer tooling live in separate systems.

This fragmentation leads to glue code, fragile previews, duplicated logic, and workflows that are difficult to maintain.

As projects grow, these costs compound and slow down both iteration speed and long-term maintainability.

Design principles

  • Content-first: explicit content models drive rendering
  • Predictable SSR: rendering behavior is clear and debuggable
  • Developer experience as a first-class concern
  • No unnecessary abstraction layers: only what real use cases require

What Ekit does today

Today, Ekit focuses on server-side rendering driven by structured content and explicit data sources.

Editing, templates, and previews live together in a single developer-oriented environment.

The goal is not to replace every CMS, but to provide a coherent workflow for content-heavy applications.

Where Ekit is heading

The roadmap is driven by real-world usage and the friction encountered while using Ekit day to day.

  • Collaborative editing and real-time previews
  • Richer introspection and advanced intellisense
  • Native backend actions for common content workflows
  • More explicit content modeling and validation
  • Stronger tooling around deployment and environments

How Ekit fits into the ecosystem

Ekit sits between a headless CMS and a custom SSR engine.

It combines the structure and API mindset of headless platforms with the control and predictability of custom rendering setups.

The focus is not feature breadth, but clarity, performance, and developer experience.

Ekit continues to evolve, shaped intentionally by real projects rather than abstract feature lists.

Future posts will dive deeper into implementation details, trade-offs, and lessons learned while building and using it.

Discussion

  • Which parts of your current content stack create the most friction?
  • What would you expect from a content-first rendering engine?
  • At what point did your CMS or SSR setup start getting in the way?