Ask HN: Is Content Management a solved problem?

As part of one of my hacking for fun projects, I decided to take on the task of building a lightweight CMS for Ruby on Rails. It's more of an exercise to stretch myself beyond my current experience than anything else.

As I started doing research and building it out, I realized how many CMSs exist out in the wild today[1]. I also determined that this is a project that doesn't scratch my own itch, which makes me nervous about making design decisions.

None of these things will deter me from finishing my project, but some of them may deter me from publicly releasing it.

What does Hacker News think about content management? Is it a flawed system needing radical rethinking, or is it merely a landscape littered with half-baked options? Any reflections on having non-technical people update dynamic content would be appreciated.

[1] -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems

Content management is very definitely NOT a solved problem.

Even if you restrict the domain to just blogging software, there are a ton of unsatisfied people (myself included). Blogging software is still bad enough that a bunch of people are still writing their own.

A possible solution is something that's more than a framework but less than a fully functioning software package. I think that's the general idea behind drupal, but during the limited time I spent with it I wasn't very impressed.

If there's a 100 different systems out there that's a pretty amazing sign that CMS is not a solved problem. I think part of the problem is there is no way to build a one-size fits all solution. Any solution will need to be customized by a technical person.

Even if it was, why wouldn't you release?

I think there are enough specific end-user needs to justify tons of specific CMS instances. It's funny to me how much wordpress is hacked up in order to try and accommodate more business oriented clients. I think tons of freelancers sell their clients hacked wordpress sites because it gives their clients CMS access, even if all they are doing is "updating a blog post".

A CMS is just a tool, not a solution. So rather than asking if CMS is a solved problem I think a better approach would be asking what problems need which kind of CMS and building from there.