I work for a small to medium size hospitality chain (around 50 cafe's). We’re preparing for a planned growth phase to approximately 200 locations and are beginning work on a new staff intranet.

At current, I am the business’s sole developer and have hard-coded several internal web applications and tools. For the intranet, however, our marketing team will manage most of the content / presentation, while I’ll primarily maintain the underlying functionality and integrations. We therefore need a reliable drag-and-drop editing experience for non-technical users without preventing me from working directly with the source code.

I’m currently running separate marketing and development WordPress environments with MariaDB through Docker on an always-on computer. WordPress will act as the private editing environment and will eventually be reachable remotely through a protected Cloudflare Tunnel. The employee-facing intranet itself will be hosted separately through Cloudflare Pages and a Worker.

Our main requirements are:

• A user-friendly drag-and-drop editor that doesn’t become frustrating or overly restrictive.
• The ability for Marketing and HR to manage which roles or specific employees can access particular content. eg. recruitment guides only available to managers.
• Proper server-side enforcement of those permissions, rather than simply hiding content visually.
• The ability for me to develop custom themes, plugins, integrations and backend functionality directly in code.
• A modular setup that avoids excessive page-builder lock-in and remains maintainable as the intranet grows.

For the initial prototype, I’m comparing a custom interface built with native WordPress blocks against visual editing workflows using Elementor and Beaver Builder.

Has anyone implemented a similar division between a marketing-managed visual editor and a separately maintained technical backend?

I’d particularly appreciate experiences involving role-restricted content, custom development alongside the editor, performance, maintainability and how difficult it was to move away from the chosen editing approach later.