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The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

next.jazzsequence.com

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Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#21

Post by bombcar »

reconnecting wrote: post #2

There is indeed not always a need for WordPress. I have been using ProcessWire (1) for over a decade. Open-source, zero dependencies, no-nonsense CMS — and when it comes time to build a new website, I go back to it even in 2026, because you make it once and it works for 10 years and counting. Cloudflare is just jealous that most of their customers are actually running WordPress, but this is not something they will be…

This looks extensible - how is the marketplace for finding people who can work on it? Wordpress is so common because it's so common you can always find someone to hack it together.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#22

Post by huijzer »

simonw wrote: post #9

I expect the bigger risk to dynamic database-backed CMS platforms right now is that AI assistance makes static site generator tools run against a version controlled repository of content less intimidating for most users... and static sites are cheaper to run (especially in this era of badly coded scrapers flooding the internet) and much less likely to fall vulnerable to security problems. I expect we'll see a further…

> and static sites are cheaper to run (especially in this era of badly coded scrapers flooding the internet)

Is that really such a problem for the average Joe? I'm running multiple blogs via a Rust CMS [1] on the cheapest Hetzner server, and have had no problems with the scrapers or load or anything. Have also gotten to the HN front page without issues talking about that you shouldn't put a site behind Cloudflare since most don't need it [2]. Now of course, for businesses or something who depend on the service to be online, it's different. But I'm talking about regular Joe's blog here.

[1]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/fx

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45965060

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#23

Post by huijzer »

threetonesun wrote: post #18
simonw wrote: post #9

I expect the bigger risk to dynamic database-backed CMS platforms right now is that AI assistance makes static site generator tools run against a version controlled repository of content less intimidating for most users... and static sites are cheaper to run (especially in this era of badly coded scrapers flooding the internet) and much less likely to fall vulnerable to security problems. I expect we'll see a further…

There's Tina CMS for editing files in Git, but honestly editing flat files is probably the least interesting or complicated part of an enterprise CMS, and IMO there's rarely a good reason to interact with files directly versus a database that publishes files.

I ran git-based blogs for years and have gone back to CMS. The instant preview and the instant publishing really make it a lot more pleasant to work with it. With Git, my read-eval-print loop so to say was a minute which is just too long. Fixing a typo then takes 2 minutes.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#24

Post by justsomehnguy »

fg137 wrote: post #7

> Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO, wrote about how he migrated his personal blog from WordPress to Astro, the hottest new JavaScript framework in town, and suggested the blasphemous idea that not all sites need a CMS (he’s since migrated again to EmDash, which I talk about later) That's a weird thing to read. (Not criticism for the author or the article) > Migrated his personal blog Is that a thing worth mentioni…

> Is that a thing worth mentioning? I did that over a decade ago.

Is that a thing worth mentioning? I abandoned my personal blog a decade ago.

/s but only so slightly.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#25

Post by jeromegv »

tappio wrote: post #20

I have built a product which uses AI to built Astro sites. LLM builds the sites in steps and make sure that they get 100/100 scores in pagespeed insights. These sites are served with a CDN. You can edit the sites with LLM interface, or use markdown editor to edit sites, or edit texts directly on a dashboard. These sites are static. There is no vendor lock in. If you want to migrate and manage yourself, just go to clo…

What do you use to edit texts on a dashboard or cms?

My wife needed a website. I’m not much of a frontend coder but I looked at the price of squarespace for a year and decided to go that route with AI.

Website is Astro. I easily update sophisticated designs with Claude or Gemini cli.

Hosted for free on cloudflare, it’s super fast. Any git update deploys to the website in a minute.

Got an hosted email form with astro action.

The only thing left is integrating a CMS. I was thinking of keystatic but it’s not compatible with Astro 6 yet. That’s the issue with vibe coding a stack you don’t know as much, without realizing it picked a version of astro that was so new that some tools didnt quite integrate with it yet.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#26

Post by christoff12 »

pjmlp wrote: post #11

CMS is pretty much alive, even if most of them are now headless, oriented towards MACH deployments and AI based workflows.

I didn't know about MACH, interesting.

I made a thing [1] a few months ago because I wanted a lightweight expression of this.

[1] https://github.com/bootstrapital/flatcontent

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#27

Post by torm »

I wouldn’t drop WordPress for Astro - but I did for Hugo. Never been happier.

My perspective comes from enterprise: we use(d) a marketing agency to run two websites. A few months ago I discovered our team was spending 30+ minutes just to publish a blog post written by a product manager. Everything was built on Elementor blocks. Articles pasted from Word kept breaking styles. 20+ plugins creating a security nightmare.

With AI assistance, we migrated to Hugo in three days. 800+ pages. 15 reusable components. Zero plugin chaos. Permissions handled at the git level. A simple HTML form to upload images and paste articles for less technical people, most were fine with markdown already. GitHub Actions for cleanup, validation, and spellchecking. Attack surface minimized. Performance improved drastically.

I’ll stand behind this: most people don’t need a bloated CMS. They need clarity on what they want to achieve, a solid process, and software that turns that process into a system.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#28

Post by allpratik »

tappio wrote: post #20

I have built a product which uses AI to built Astro sites. LLM builds the sites in steps and make sure that they get 100/100 scores in pagespeed insights. These sites are served with a CDN. You can edit the sites with LLM interface, or use markdown editor to edit sites, or edit texts directly on a dashboard. These sites are static. There is no vendor lock in. If you want to migrate and manage yourself, just go to clo…

Ditto. Almost all of my internal tools are built in the same fashion and deployed on cloudflare itself. It is so much liberating to have no overload of CMS and the bloated code they come with.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#30

Post by lizardking »

A CMS is for content authors, not developers. AI making it easier to build or re-platform sites doesn’t change the need for an admin UI that non-technical people can actually use, or the need for access control, governance, and approval workflows around how content gets changed.

If anything, I’d expect more CMS work to occur as the cost of building, migrating, and redesigning sites keeps dropping.

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