Widget preview debugger for CMS developers

A developer hands off a CMS to a content team and three days later gets a ticket: 'the widget editor is showing the wrong thing' or 'we can't find where to click to edit this section.' These aren't configuration mistakes — they're a predictable consequence of live widget editing interfaces that layer multiple levels of nested components on a single page, making it genuinely unclear which toolbar belongs to which widget. One complaint puts it plainly: 'live edition of the widgets on the web can be confusing, especially when the website has various widget levels.' Another describes having to write extra CSS just to make editor bars visible.

This gap persists because CMS vendors build the widget editing system for developers who understand the content model — but developers aren't the ones using it daily. The person who configured the site has moved on, and the content team inherits an interface they can't navigate without asking for help. Every help request is invisible cost: developer time pulled away from building, content editor time lost, and updates delayed.

A diagnostic and configuration tool that lets a developer audit a CMS page's widget hierarchy, see exactly which editor controls are assigned to which zone, and generate a visual map that content editors can reference — plus a stylesheet override toolkit for making editor bars visible without custom CSS per widget — addresses the structural handoff problem. It's not a feature any CMS vendor will build because it implicitly admits their interface is confusing. It's a business because every new CMS implementation has this handoff moment, and agencies doing multiple CMS rollouts per year hit it repeatedly.

What to build

Build a browser extension and companion config file generator that, when pointed at an ApostropheCMS or similar widget-based CMS admin session, renders an overlay showing each widget's edit zone boundaries, maps toolbar positions to their corresponding content blocks, and outputs a CSS snippet that makes all editor controls visible without conflicting with the host theme.

Where to start

Sell directly to agencies doing ApostropheCMS implementations — there are enough of them in the ApostropheCMS community Discord and GitHub to find your first five paying customers through direct conversation, and each agency has the handoff problem on every project they ship.

The hard part

The browser extension approach requires handling CMS-specific DOM structures that can change with CMS version updates, so you're in a constant maintenance relationship with upstream CMS releases — you need to decide early whether to narrow to one CMS version and own that deeply, or build an abstraction that breaks less but helps less.

How it makes money

Annual license per agency (covers unlimited sites they manage), priced so it's cheaper than two hours of developer time spent fielding confused content editor tickets.