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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Back in 2016 I was still doing a lot of custom sites for small/mid businesses, and realized that almost all of this could be done with WP or something except (1) WP styling is really annoying and I don't want to maintain that, (2) I didn't want to rely on plugin functionality and upgrading WP, and (3) I wanted people with different levels of access to be able to edit different parts of the…
In about 2009, the university I worked at adopted one of those enterprise CMS thingamajigs, but this one was called RedDot, and the central UX conceit was a red dot next to every piece of content, which transformed it into an edit control when clicked... Under the hood it was about as shit as every other enterprise CMS of the era, but our users fucking loved it.
Most small site owners, such as remain these days - restuarants, small companies selling furniture, lawyers, whatever - they already have their third party sales platforms. They just want to be able to edit their own web content from time to time, without any learning curve.
I never tried to commercialize my CMS, it wouldn't even make sense to do so, since it's geared toward people who want to pay $200/year for hosting once their site is up and running. (I did charge them well for building, though). But the whole thing is maybe literally 5000 lines of PHP code and a few hundred lines of Javascript and CSS. It's just structured very cleverly to read/write pages in mysql, and it has a few bells and whistles like drag/drop photo uploading in place. Barely competent PHP coders could (and have) adapted it to their own needs after I left clients. One really doesn't need the bloated structure of WP to do this stuff, just a very skeletal frame.
A couple remaining examples of my CMS in action: https://thebarkerlounge.com https://vickmanassociates.com