The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
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The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
1–10 of 106 posts
Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
#2There 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 able to solve with AI hype.
Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
#3The same way coding agents don’t replace the need for an IDE, content generation needs to support arbitrary human-to-agent handoffs, where the human can say “this is the wrong direction, I sketched this change of what I want it to look like, see how it’s different and apply that pattern.”
And, in the broadest sense, that human interface is a CMS; the agent is just another editor, albeit one that happens to read and write raw data rather than using a WYSIWIG (or similar) editor.
Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
#4I’m not sure that I buy all the points made. I can imagine an AI centric CMS where the technical interface (implement this site on MySQL, host it there, use Next.js, etc) is distinct from the content interface (change store hours) or even the design (change the background).
I have used Wordpress a lot (too much) and came to the view that for most websites it is just overkill. So I built https://harcstack.org and vowed to write all my new sites in actual code.
HTMX to the rescue since you can write server side code in a sensible way and still have quite a dymanic UX.
Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
#5I never really understood the argument, you can design the frontend with AI anyway and then use WordPress as the CMS for clients. Clients want to be able to log in, update CPTs, edit a calendar, post pictures, things like that. Surely the idea isn't to vibe-code an admin panel/cms from scratch for every project?
Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
#6There 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 for Processwire! I’ve mentioned it here a few times over the years and nobody seems to have ever heard of it! I’ve got a few sites well past 10 years now still happily chugging away on it! Basically zero issues with it, ever. It’s still my go to for all sorts of projects - installs in a few seconds, loads of really useful functionality out the box, easy API, beautifully flexible for all sorts of projects and a great community and ecosystem around it as well!
Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
#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 mentioning? I did that over a decade ago.
> Astro, the hottest new JavaScript framework in town
I thought it's 2026 now, not early 2010s. People still do that?
> the blasphemous idea that not all sites need a CMS
Is it? People still haven't accepted this?
Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
#8The same way coding agents don’t replace the need for an IDE, content generation needs to support arbitrary human-to-agent handoffs, where the human can say “this is the wrong direction, I sketched this change of what I want it to look like, see how it’s different and apply that pattern.” And, in the broadest sense, that human interface is a CMS; the agent is just another editor, albeit one that happens to read and w…
> coding agents don’t replace the need for an IDE
Depending on who you talk to, they may not agree. (I am not in this camp but I am certainly aware of people who are.)
Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
#9I 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 wave of CMS interfaces which provide a nicer editing experience on top of flat files stored in Git.
Maybe the strategic move for platforms like WordPress (and maybe Django too! The Django admin remains a very popular CMS platform) is to invest more in separation of admin editing from serving, such that there's an obvious path to edit your content in the CMS but deploy it as static files.
My own blog uses the Django admin and serves the site via Django (albeit behind a 15m Cloudflare cache to handle traffic spikes) but I have a scheduled GitHub Action that backs up the content to a Git repository: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog-backup - it's not much of a stretch from that to having the Git repository feed content to a static site generator.
Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
#10There 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…
A client of mine is using ProcessWire as his site was done by the guys behind process wire. Big shoutout. To the system and the guys.
Great system as far as I am concerned - even if I tend to use KirbyCMS for most of my projects.