Ask HN: Is Content Management a solved problem?

I make a CMS and sell it for a living (we also have an open source version). I'll be the first to say we're nowhere near 100% there, and won't be for a long time.

CMS is a bit vague because it encompasses so many areas that overlap, so one product is inherently not going to excel at all of them. These areas include:

- Traditional content management - Document management - Workflow/notifications - Revision control - Access control/restrictions - Website editing - Website layouts - Website features (forum, search, blog, events, member registration, ad infinitum) - Website building framework for custom development

The core of a web CMS is just a framework (or in traditional CMS-speak, a content server...), then come the apps that each handle different components of the site (blog, events, etc), followed by one of those apps which handles the actual content management itself which tends to encompass the rest of the above points.

As you can see, this is a lot for a single app to do and do well. Some of these aren't needed for smaller sites, but the same CMS that works well for those then won't work well for larger ones. And the more features a CMS has, the less it retains of the simplicity that made it appeal to the smaller sites.

Personally, these days I use our CMS as the framework that underlies the SaaS software I'm building for my other startup, so that's where my focus has been. So for at least the next while, the biggest changes in our CMS are likely simply to be framework-level things to save development time or improve performance and things like that. But again, those only benefit me and those users using it as a framework, not those who just need a simple web page editor.

In short, CMS fails because it tries to be everything to everyone. Blogging software overtook it in popularity because it did exactly the opposite. Now most blogging software is following the same path and becoming bloated CMSes... Kinda funny to watch actually :)

Maybe the best approach is to do as Ruby on Rails did -- do something real, and then create your tool/infrastructure around/in reaction to that (in Rails' case, it was Basecamp and subsequent applications, as well as contributions by other working practitioners -- not stuffy people sitting on committees writing specs instead of applications that people use).

So, in order to make a CMS, you ought to have some content to manage. Make your CMS really, really good at managing that particular collection of bits you care about so dearly without making things complicated. That seems like a good strategy to me. Yes? No?

To answer your question directly, if you think you can create some useful software that scratches your itch in a novel way (slightly novel is more than sufficient), by all means work on it, and post a follow up here so we can try it out! :)

I'm not sure how you define a "solved problem." Do you have an example? When it comes to end-user software applications, I can't think of any problem that has been solved categorically (contact management, calendaring, browsers, word processing, spreadhseets).

That's why I would take the other comments in this thread with a grain of salt. True, nobody has solved content management -- BUT, the leading solutions have put in a ton of work to solve vast swaths of the problem space even if they haven't nailed the whole thing.

Wordpress, for example, while not the most architecturally elegant piece of software in the world, is an incredibly rich, powerful, and useable content management system. The plugin system enables a developer to extend the application in any number of directions, while the administrative toolset is sleek and sophisticated yet easy enough for hundreds of thousands of bloggers to use.

Okay, I didn't mean to turn this is into an ad for Wordpress (which I've used as a CMS on several projects, btw). My point is simply that your CMS would have to get very far advanced before it even reached the terrain where the problems that Wordpress has not solved lie.

I don't mean to discourage you in your project, but simply to point out the road might be more difficult than others make it appear. As a consolation here are a few areas that I haven't (in my own limited experience anyway) seen many CMSs nail effectively:

* Content versioning

* User commenting features (threaded commenting, ratings, user management/ownership of comments -- basically disqus's whole business is built on this lacking)

* Snippet management (tools to manage little copy snippets etc., not just pages/posts)

I'd be curious if anyone else had any specific features they felt were part of the "unsolved" problem set.

CMS is definitely an NP-hard kind of problem... no matter how many features a CMS has, end users will always find something lacking...

One of the other issues I have found with CMS is that the software does not evolve as fast as the business requirements... so good luck!!!