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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

#81

Post by sebastiennight »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #69
hombre_fatal wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built a production forum from scratch with thousands of real users. For years I thought of doing it. Can’t be that hard. You can imagine how every component would work. You just need a few tables, right? But it turns out a polished forum that people want to spend time on has infinite polish. Every feature explodes into a fractal of micro polish. You could spend your whole life improving it and handling rough edges…

I also thought about this but decided to go with Simple Machines Forum and I'm glad I did. Just looking at the dearth of options in the admin area is enough to make my head spin. That being said, I probably will embark on a custom form just because I'm highly opinionated and capable.

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Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#82

Post by jeromegv »

bryanhogan wrote: post #33
jeromegv wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you planning on having just simple content as markdown files, or your own database + CMS?

I want to avoid a database, so it would be file storage on git for content.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#83

Post by JodieBenitez »

nchmy wrote: post #40
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…

What is always astounding to me is that people talk as if caching isn't a thing. It could hardly be easier to cache the html output from wordpress at either the webserver or CDN level, and it will perform just the same as any "static site" (of course, images, css etc will dictate how it performs once the browser receives the cached html)

> people talk as if caching isn't a thing

Maybe you'd be surprised by how little some "engineers" know about http cache headers.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#84

Post by JodieBenitez »

_the_inflator wrote: post #32

What constitutes a Wordpress Site? The 3 page hobby site or the 100th of pages of a large company? There is a reason why Wordpress is (open source!) dominating the space ever since or more precisely, many niches. To be honest, I had my fair share of "You might not need Wordpress" but in the end, nothing beats its versatility, its rights management and options. There is always a plugin for that. I see no conntenter. A…

> Wordpress is the reliable dude who looks boringly normal, but on the other hand never gets you into trouble.

Sorry, but... what ? I could literaly start a business called "Wordpress Rescue Team" and make a living with this if I wanted to get my hands this dirty. The number of times I had to clean the mistakes users do when given an admin panel...

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#85

Post by aaztehcy »

weitendorf wrote: post #63
tappio wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, I completely agree. The thing is, this kind of customer just doesn't want to bother themselves with the technical details, and has no frame of reference to understand or even care why Wordpress isn't actually a good fit for hosting their site. They also usually don't want to self-serve. IMO this became abundantly clear once I saw who was using bolt.new and Lovable and what was being built. You'd think these woul…

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Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#87

Post by phplovesong »

CMS will probably always have its place. This is actully how PHP became popular. From all PHP deployments in 2026 WordPress alone is somewhere in the 80% ballpark (meaning near all PHP projects is WP).

Greenfield rarely uses PHP in 2026, unless its wordpress.

But the CMS market has also shifted, AI can generate good looking websites fast. This means the traditional web agency shops are between a rock and a hard place. Clients no longer pay tens of thousands for a site, and demand is also going down as its semi easy to vibe something in a weekend.

That said rhere WILL be a demand for CMS sites (wordpress) but devs are a dime a dozen, and the quality will most likely be even worse than what youd see traditionally in PHP and wordpress.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#88

Post by ymolodtsov »

jasomill wrote: post #73
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…

I’m confused. Static sites are the opposite of the target market for CMS. Even assuming consistent behavior from an LLM that never makes mistakes, how does your system handle access control, or multiple users submitting, reviewing, and publishing content to the site simultaneously?

Static website use headless CMS to give a more pleasant and mobile-friendly UI. I always deploy with SveltiaCMS.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#89

Post by oortcrate_1 »

The 'CMS is dead' take usually ignores the reality of working with non-engineers. You can't expect a content editor to push a git commit just to fix a typo. The complexity of building a reliable WYSIWYG or a preview layer is way higher than it looks at first. For me, a good CMS is basically 'complexity insurance' for the team.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#90

Post by reconnecting »

bombcar wrote: post #21
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.

First point is the ProcessWire forum (1) — there's a super friendly community always willing to help. Second, there is a developers directory (2).

There aren't a million dev adopters, but I actually see this as a benefit, because if you talk with someone from the forum, you'll see that most of them are highly experienced engineers. Core team members are in the US and EU.

1. https://processwire.com/talk/

2. https://directory.processwire.com/developers/

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