Once upon a time my team built The Players’ Tribune with headless Wordpress + Nextjs + CDN , which I believe is a fairly common choice these days, on that it strikes a nice middle-ground between a refined editing experience for the end-user and a not overly-complex experience for the dev team. For a static content-heavy site, it worked fine.
But the real issue at stake here is more subtle than the question of the experiences of end-users vs developers, or of ecosystems vs. complexity, or is insecure vs secure.
The real issue is writing “static content-heavy site” as if static and content-heavy must go together. There is an assumption that a content-heavy site will be static. This is not true.
I’m baffled that almost all content-heavy sites relegate dynamic content to “Related content” and “Recommended content” to sidebars and post-content sections. Facebook and social media, one could argue, have become successful in large part because their content is dynamic in the same way ad-tech is dynamic — presenting the content contextual to a particular user’s interest and behavior. Tik Tok does this the best.
The enduring legacy of Wordpress (regardless of whether you use Wordpress or some alternative) is that the content-is-static mindset has become an unquestioned axiom. The very idea of a WYSIWYG is that content is and always will be static.
Although Tik-Tok has demonstrated the power of dynamic delivery of content, the content itself still remains static. How could it not be, most people still locked into the static-content mindset might ask.
But there’s no reason that individual chunks of content can’t be dynamic too. After all, we do have different sized thumbnails for previews of content on different screen sizes. So why not different versions of headlines? Or different versions of an entire article (not simply teaser vs. body).
The reason is that, as always, our imaginations are limited by our tools. Our content tools embed an impoverished imagination.
The content-world is waiting for a startup to give us a CMS that embeds an imagination where content is dynamic, both in delivery and in substance. Moreover, with tools like GPT3, the generation of adjusted content is now practical. While an editor could write 100 versions of an article, based on combinations of style, tone, and length, GPT3 could generate drafts that would reduce an editor’s work to ... editing.
The CMS is ripe for fundamental innovation. Here’s hoping someone is working on it!