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The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

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Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#41

Post by jillesvangurp »

I use AI as a full blown web master at this point. It maintains the site, functionality, etc. But I also make it track SEO performance, analytics. And I make it publish content. Sometimes that's based on a few bullets. Sometimes I submit my own drafts. I use guard rails and skills to ensure it all ends up the way I want. The management of the site is outsourced to the AI. And when I'm done it also makes sure the pull request merges cleanly and that the gh action to deploy (it creates that as well) does its thing.

Using a CMS is overkill if you have a static website generator. And once you have that it's just another code base that you can unleash agentic coding tools on. Most websites are pretty straightforward code bases to work with for AIs. The only real argument for a CMS always was providing an easy to use environment for people to work in without having to worry about technology. They power editorial processes too. But you don't need one any more if you can let AIs coordinate those processes. Use a word processor of your choice. Hand your draft off to the AI and let it do its thing.

Once you have this dialed in, which doesn't actually have to take a whole lot of time, you can get very efficient around content creation and management. Having good guard rails and investing in those is critical here and makes the difference between slop and having something that is actually informative and fresh. The guard rails can also deal with approval processes, fact checking, translations, audio transcriptions, check lists, tone/wording checks, etc. You can make this as complicated as you need to.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#42

Post by zer00eyz »

donohoe wrote: post #37

It’s important to note the use-cases here. A lot of this discussion treats "CMS" as a single thing, but the requirements vary wildly depending on scale: one blogger versus a five-person marketing team versus hundreds of authors and contributors. Different arenas. If you’re spinning up a personal CMS, great. Have fun, you’ll learn a lot. But once you’re dealing with multiple users (tens or hundreds) it’s a different p…

> But once you’re dealing with...

All of this is spot on!

> FTA: One that’s superior to the admin panel of WordPress or Drupal?

When you get to that multi person team, has any one asked them if they LIKE the CMS they are using? Because I assure you that they appreciate the functionality but it isnt a tool that any one is happy about using.

Usable and Usability are NOT the same thing, it is a lesson that was lost in the dot com bubble burst, that we might need to get back to.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#44

Post by nchmy »

coffeefirst wrote: post #15

Wordpress, like SQL, is probably immortal. But it needs a better headless capability. Most separate front ends appear to be grafted on relying on plugins. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

What plugin-free headless capability do you envision for WP? Isn't that what the REST API is for? And isn't plugin-free WP effectively useless?

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#45

Post by tossandthrow »

donohoe wrote: post #37

It’s important to note the use-cases here. A lot of this discussion treats "CMS" as a single thing, but the requirements vary wildly depending on scale: one blogger versus a five-person marketing team versus hundreds of authors and contributors. Different arenas. If you’re spinning up a personal CMS, great. Have fun, you’ll learn a lot. But once you’re dealing with multiple users (tens or hundreds) it’s a different p…

I think the idea that every body are going to build their own SaaS product is likely wrong.

But that is also not the only was to have impact.

Whatbindo think happens is that everybody already building things will reduce or entirely remove their reliance on other SaaS tools.

So retool and other support products are likely dead.

The people who used these products are already more than capable of rolling Auth.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#46

Post by skeeter2020 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #36
zrn900 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But 95% of web does not need it. Literally talking without knowledge here. There is always something that can be added with a Wordpress plugin and there is somebody who needs that. > static site There is no magic to that. You can make any Wordpress site basically static with one single plugin without losing any feature Wordpress provides. There is a reason why NASA, White House, Techcrunch, Reuters et al are all on…

> There is always something that can be added with a Wordpress plugin and there is somebody who needs that. They're asserting you can do that stuff yourself now. > There is a reason why NASA, White House, Techcrunch, Reuters et al are all on Wordpress and any of the 'better' cmses out there. First, those are large orgs. Most WP sites are not that large or complicated. Second, would those orgs use WP if they started f…

You could do this with AI for at least the past decade. We saw lots of companies & frameworks spring up that targeted and did the ahrd work pushing this approach. That feels like the big change, with "using AI" to be an incremental gain here.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#47

Post by tappio »

zrn900 wrote: post #35
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…

> But 95% of web does not need it. Literally talking without knowledge here. There is always something that can be added with a Wordpress plugin and there is somebody who needs that. > static site There is no magic to that. You can make any Wordpress site basically static with one single plugin without losing any feature Wordpress provides. There is a reason why NASA, White House, Techcrunch, Reuters et al are all on…

NASA, White House, and which ever large organizations do not represent the most of the web.

When you have complexity, multiple non techincal users who need to update content, and frequent changes, a CMS is currently a very good solution. But thats just a small fraction of websites.

Most of websites are small, 1-2 person companies websites, non-profts, etc., that are basically business cards. Contact details, possibly a contact form, and few pictures. Thats it. There are likely at least hundred milloin websites like that, which are infrequently updated.

Majority of those sites are powered by WP and various site builders, which is far more complicated than what they need. There has not been good option for non-techincal users that makes it possible to make good looking and functional sites.

Also, please keep it civil. This is not Facebook. People can have different opinions.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#48

Post by dawnerd »

ceejayoz wrote: post #36
zrn900 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But 95% of web does not need it. Literally talking without knowledge here. There is always something that can be added with a Wordpress plugin and there is somebody who needs that. > static site There is no magic to that. You can make any Wordpress site basically static with one single plugin without losing any feature Wordpress provides. There is a reason why NASA, White House, Techcrunch, Reuters et al are all on…

> There is always something that can be added with a Wordpress plugin and there is somebody who needs that. They're asserting you can do that stuff yourself now. > There is a reason why NASA, White House, Techcrunch, Reuters et al are all on Wordpress and any of the 'better' cmses out there. First, those are large orgs. Most WP sites are not that large or complicated. Second, would those orgs use WP if they started f…

Those orgs choose WordPress today. Source: that’s our bread and butter doing enterprise WP.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#49

Post by coldtea »

donohoe wrote: post #37

It’s important to note the use-cases here. A lot of this discussion treats "CMS" as a single thing, but the requirements vary wildly depending on scale: one blogger versus a five-person marketing team versus hundreds of authors and contributors. Different arenas. If you’re spinning up a personal CMS, great. Have fun, you’ll learn a lot. But once you’re dealing with multiple users (tens or hundreds) it’s a different p…

>If you’re spinning up a personal CMS, great. Have fun, you’ll learn a lot. But once you’re dealing with multiple users (tens or hundreds) it’s a different problem.

Is it? Django was just a personal project that started as a CMS for a newspaper. And that's pre-AI, and pre tons of libraries handling all kinds of functionalty like 2FA to offload features to.

And the core backend design and functionality for a CMS is a stable target that hasn't changed in 3 decades, unlike with other software.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#50

Post by RHSeeger »

donohoe wrote: post #37

It’s important to note the use-cases here. A lot of this discussion treats "CMS" as a single thing, but the requirements vary wildly depending on scale: one blogger versus a five-person marketing team versus hundreds of authors and contributors. Different arenas. If you’re spinning up a personal CMS, great. Have fun, you’ll learn a lot. But once you’re dealing with multiple users (tens or hundreds) it’s a different p…

> But once you’re dealing with multiple users (tens or hundreds) it’s a different problem. How confident are you writing auth and password reset flows? How sure are you that the AI got it right? How solid is your approach to roles and permissions? Are you implementing 2FA? Supporting drafts, scheduled publishing, editorial workflows? Now you are also tech support writing the infrastructure as issues come in.

And that's only the start of where it gets complicated

- Ingesting data from 3rd party systems

- Translating content to other languages

- Front end user auth and preferences

- Personalized content

- A/B testing

- Multiple sites in the same CMS, sharing the same content

The list of things that add on to make a cms (and the sites it is used to create) more complicated is enormous.

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