Still can’t believe there is no true open source cms that sits on top of a Postgres db. Like. Yea you have payload but you are locked into nextjs. Just a cms that hooks into openapi or Postgres natively would be great. I still prefer Django over anything else now days.
The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
61–70 of 106 posts
Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
#62I 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 built the same thing and then just realized that I built a marketing funnel for Cloudflare lol. It's why Cloudflare is trying a bunch of different approaches to the same thing, they're the only ones that actually benefit from it because you can't actually build a business off hosting millions of sites on cf pages, it's a loss leader for them to convert you to a paid product if you end up one day getting a lot of traffic
Hosting a static site isn't free, they just don't charge you for it early on
Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
#63Earlier 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…
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 would be perfect fits for non-technical business owners, but after talking to them more it turns out they just don't have the time or interest to spend hours on building some little marketing site, and want it to be someone else's responsibility. Conversely, I would never build something with Framer and have no interesting in allowing some fly-by-night agency hold my site hostage, but they do a lot better at actually delivering value to end users without making them spend their time on tech stuff they don't care about.
Conversely, the kind of person spending hours building a site on Lovable for some SaaS product nobody will ever use has an abundance of time and doesn't really want to pay for anything. Most of the time they won't even put their own name on the site lol. You just don't want to deal with that kind of person IMO. Cloudflare and Github allow it because there's a small chance that a small portion of that kind of person ends up actually making something valuable, and because they have a different cost structure due to their affiliations with massive infrastructure holders.
I got very, very close to launching a vertical static site hosting product a few months ago but eventually realized this was kind of a market for lemons. Our own site is on a Lovable-like platform we built that uses our own svelte-baesd FOSS static site generator called Statue. But in using it to try to make some visualization on our own site, and vibe-debug stuff like a non-technical customer would (this thing on this page is broken in this way) I realized that this wouldn't actually feel like magic to someone who values their time, or isn't getting paid a salary to be a web developer and doesn't understand/care that it's still quite labor-intensive to do this.
IMO the real money is in actually being willing to take accountability/responsibility for building someone's site, and building real tooling around it that works for non-developers AND developers, which is what we're building towards now. It's historically been treated as a kind of low-prestige/uninteresting/unscalable business doing agency web stuff, but if you can figure out how to make it scalable and give people beautiful websites, and not make people who value their time wade through slop, there's immense opportunity.
Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
#64It’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…
Agreed, the type of person who can say "I'll just build my own CMS" is not usually the type of person spending a significant portion of their job time using a CMS.
And you might say, well if they're somewhat technical (which is much more likely, think about eg technical writers or product managers or marketing teams) they can use AI to add more features. But when you actually have something at stake security-wise, that means you need to either put them on rails with something much more prescriptive (a "trad-CMS" lmao) or spend a bunch of time reviewing/fixing their code (which, since they're not the same kind of person as you, may not even be something they have any interest in doing, and kind of just gets in the way of them getting their message out on your site as intended).
That said, I think most tech companies will still roll their own internal tools to do this rather than buy it off the shelf, just because buying it through a vendor and fully setting up in a way that's secure and integrated with your business processes involves more work than rolling it yourself, and has a lot of ways it can go wrong.
IMO what you really want is some kind of FOSS CMS that works really well off-the-shelf for a small team, and has a strong ecosystem of integrations to add on SSO and visual editors and stuff like that as you grow, where you can also probably just hire someone to do that part since that would probably coincide with your business getting too busy for spending your time on an internal CMS to be the most effective use of your time. Which is literally wordpress.
It's just that wordpress is a death-by-a-thousand-cuts of mediocre quality/over-complicated stuff, and the core technology has some bad abstractions/shows its age, and that emanates out into everything else it touches. Also, while it's true that a static site is much better for most people, SOMEONE has to actually run a web-server for those files, and that does actually cost money to provide, so I've softened my thoughts on Wordpress doing that. It's not actually free for Cloudflare to do that for you, it's just a loss leader they can afford to give away because they have economies of scale and privileged access to the Internet.
Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
#65It’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…
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 and making it nicer to use.
The WYSIWYG editor being a good example. You could work on just that full-time and never run out of things to do. Or the daylight between a MVP notification system and a mature one that sends PM/email notifs, tracks high water marks, lets users mute certain threads, infinite polish.
Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
#66A recurring theme of the AI rollout era is ppl thinking that AIs render a technology or process obsolete.
CMS's like wordpress don't solve the problem of allowing non-technical people to manage a website. They solve the problem of allowing you to separate the content of your website from the logic of it.
Now of course these tools will change to be used by Agents, but honestly probably less than you'd think. AIs are very good at interacting with software like humans, so the transition will be pretty small
Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
#67[flagged]
Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
#68There 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…
+1 processwire. I have 10+ year old sites still running that have needed 0 maintenance, still running as good as day 1.
even have built some complicated apps with it with great success.
it was the first headless CMS I found, before headless was a thing.
Just keeps getting better all the time too
Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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.
Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
#70I was a drupal user, then wordpress user, both are too complicated for my personal sites, so I used golang to build a cms with AI for my own use, easy and good enough to suit my needs. so yes, no more wordpress for me at all.