[HN Gopher] The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
___________________________________________________________________
The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
Author : taubek
Score : 109 points
Date : 2026-04-04 11:24 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (next.jazzsequence.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (next.jazzsequence.com)
| reconnecting wrote:
| 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 able to solve with AI hype.
|
| 1. https://github.com/processwire/processwire
| christoph wrote:
| +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!
| sdoering wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| wvbdmp wrote:
| ProcessWire mentioned! Didn't expect that in 2026, but yes, I
| also use it a lot. Sites just keep chugging.
| rastographics wrote:
| +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
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| I assumed ProcessWire was some crusty olde CMS and am
| pleasantly surprised to see that it is NOT. It looks damn good
| and the sites created with it look great too. Adding this to my
| toolkit, thanks!
| btown wrote:
| The 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.
| fg137 wrote:
| > 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.)
| librasteve wrote:
| I'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.
| gman83 wrote:
| I 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?
| sdoering wrote:
| For client projects I tend to go with KirbyCMS. Easy license,
| great functionality, very easy to setup and configure for the
| client side users. And way less bloated. I actually really dig
| it and nearly exclusively use it for my projects.
|
| But other tools are great as well, like ProcessWire (named
| above).
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Depends on the client, PR agencies end up building a lot of
| little sites where they are also managing most of the content
| for the client. Wordpress was huge for this because the
| software cost was zero and basic WP engineers were not
| expensive to hire. Now they're paying for AI licenses so they
| might as well use those instead.
| fg137 wrote:
| > 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?
| sarchertech wrote:
| >founder of Yoast SEO,
|
| >wrote about how he migrated his personal blog from WordPress
| to Astro
|
| >he's since migrated _again_ to EmDash
|
| Do you need to know anything more about this guy? If that's one
| of the articles sources, I think you can ignore anything it
| says.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yoast SEO is a huge paid plugin for Wordpress, so the founder
| not using Wordpress is at least moderately interesting, in a
| "cobbler buys shoes at walmart" kind of way.
| sarchertech wrote:
| I had no idea it was a product. I thought it was an SEO
| firm. That is a bit more interesting. But I also wouldn't
| be very surprised when a cobbler that makes work boots,
| buys sneakers from Walmart.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > 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.
| simonw wrote:
| 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 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Depends on the company level, on my line of business, what
| companies care about are headless CMS, with AI workflows, and
| oriented towards MACH.
|
| Ah, and all of them have partnerships with Vercel, and possibly
| Netlify.
|
| Sitecore, Contentful, Sanity, Storybrook,...
|
| If anything, they killed the need for backend skills, you get a
| ready made SaaS, program interactions with AI, and if anything
| requires backend like logic, it is taken care by Vercel or
| Netlify functions.
| threetonesun wrote:
| 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.
| huijzer wrote:
| 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.
| simonw wrote:
| Now I'm imagining a static site editing tool that runs the
| exact same templates client-side to power an accurate
| preview that are then used by the static page build
| process.
| huijzer wrote:
| > 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
| simonw wrote:
| I had to add a Cloudflare CAPTCHA to my blog's search
| feature, but that's because I have faceted search which is a
| worst case scenario for bad crawlers.
| pjmlp wrote:
| CMS is pretty much alive, even if most of them are now headless,
| oriented towards MACH deployments and AI based workflows.
| christoff12 wrote:
| 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
| BubbleRings wrote:
| > But that idea is old enough to drink
|
| Nice turn of a phrase! I was surprised it was a GoogleNope except
| for you, op.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| 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.
| nchmy wrote:
| 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?
| tappio wrote:
| 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 cloudflare or github pages. These
| sites cost 0 eur to run, and they always score better in all
| benchmarks compared to sites that are built on top of a separate
| CMS server.
|
| I know WordPress is going nowehere and if there is some special
| backend functionality, that is needed. But 95% of web does not
| need it.
|
| A static site is always cheaper, and the bottleneck has always
| been that editing code is indimidating. Therefore, AI actually
| resolves a big problem here, and this is going to alter the
| future of platforms like WP.
| jeromegv wrote:
| 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.
| bryanhogan wrote:
| Are you planning on having just simple content as markdown
| files, or your own database + CMS?
| allpratik wrote:
| 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.
| zrn900 wrote:
| > 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 Wordpress and any of the 'better' cmses out
| there.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 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 fresh today?
| Or something like OP's setup?
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| 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.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Those orgs choose WordPress today. Source: that's our bread
| and butter doing enterprise WP.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Those orgs choose WordPress today.
|
| The organizations cited chose WordPress years ago.
|
| Choosing to stay on it is, at least sometimes, going to
| be a matter of large institutional inertia.
|
| Large enterprises are the last to move on things like
| this.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| The White House website is rebuilt by each
| administration. So in that case, it was quite a recent
| decision.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > The White House website is rebuilt by each
| administration.
|
| The Federal government is very large bureaucratic
| organization with more inertia than most. (And probably
| long-term contracts in this realm!)
| nchmy wrote:
| 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)
| tappio wrote:
| 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.
| weitendorf wrote:
| 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Literally talking without knowledge here. There is always
| something that can be added with a Wordpress plugin and there
| is somebody who needs that._
|
| So? There's always somebody who needs this or that outlier
| shit. If all that shit combined is still a small niche, we
| can just ignore it. And it is.
|
| > _There is a reason why NASA, White House, Techcrunch,
| Reuters et al are all on Wordpress and any of the 'better'
| cmses out there._
|
| And there reason is not because it has some obscure plugins
| for features few care about, but about the maturity of the
| core offering. They're not having any exotic features or have
| some random niche plugin. And even if they did, they're
| larger than 99% of websites, so we can ignore their special
| needs when talking about what MOST need.
| gbro3n wrote:
| I agree. Now we have the ability to have agents reason over our
| notes, it's more important for them to be in plain text. It was
| a big part of the reason I developed the AS Notes extension for
| managing documentation and blogs in VS Code / Markdown
| (https://www.asnotes.io)
| weitendorf wrote:
| 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
| torm wrote:
| 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.
| BloodyIron wrote:
| I'm a fan of Concrete CMS. No plans to switch away, and yes I am
| working with AI.
| lizardking wrote:
| 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.
| liu-guo wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment against blindly jumping into the AI
| wagon from CMS, but the author seems mixing that from the
| migration from CMS into markdown content + static site
| generation.
|
| To me the latter is a legit move and much cleaner architecture
| for most sites. And the issue of editing code, or really just
| markdown files, seems to be a solvable UI problem with good
| editors like Obsidian, or something similar but more tailored for
| website building.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| 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. Astro has its merits and use case - so have
| plenty of others (remember Hugo etc.?).
|
| At a certain time you will hit a threshold or problems that are
| easy to solve using WP you usually disregard at the beginning.
|
| I usually start out "No, WP isn't needed, just to regret it
| afterwards." There is a dilemma because customers only start to
| really utilize their website the moment it is setup. And it
| always went from "Just 5 pages" to "Can I add a marketplace?" to
| ballooning content as well as timed postings and social media
| integration.
|
| I stopped questioning WP, because I really don't see alternatives
| in certain spaces.
|
| Security is a concern, yes, but nevertheless, let's not talk
| about NodeJS in this regard.
|
| Wordpress isn't a paradigm, it just works and while it seems to
| be some 20 years old odd code, quite many of the CMS in the React
| space struggled hard to getting to terms with the lastest
| paradigm shifts.
|
| Wordpress is the reliable dude who looks boringly normal, but on
| the other hand never gets you into trouble.
|
| So paraphrase IBM: No one gets fires for using WordPress.
|
| And I would not say this about any other CMS. They are incredible
| hard, you have to get a lot of stuff right. But I won't implement
| my own CMS again. At a certain time everybody will come to this
| realization, most likely, when you have a deadline and miss out
| features that are hard to implement.
|
| This is my opinion and I love playing and toying around with CMS
| ever since, even forums (phpBB?) or DIGG clones like Pligg back
| then. Great stuff, but I stick to WP.
| donohoe wrote:
| 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 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.
|
| That's a very different scenario.
|
| So please, if you're going to make sweeping statements on a CMS,
| please clarify if you're talking about a solo site owner
| situation or a multi-user setup.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > 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.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > 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.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| 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.
| jiggunjer wrote:
| For my personal cms I'm using sveltia. But their oath page
| assumes the repo remote is also the IdP, this means my login
| button has a GitHub logo instead of Google logo. Now I had
| spare credits so I forked it. Next weekend I'm fixing their
| weird support for asset management in R2 buckets.
| brandensilva wrote:
| Yup, even without multiple users I took an open source speed
| reading app and quickly found myself a month deep in features
| just to expose it to multiple integrations for maximum
| accessibility. OAuth, MCP, CLI, API keys, secure and rate
| limited endpoints for content ingestion, parsing engine, a nice
| CI/CD pipeline that builds cross platform, a marketing site and
| it just kept going.
|
| It was a test to see how much work was involved and what vibe
| coding felt like in one month. I plan on releasing it soon
| because I feel like it is the best speed reading app available
| but man it's a lot of work for even what seem like simple
| cases.
|
| I'd be worried for anyone touching what I did if they did not
| have experience doing this.
| weitendorf wrote:
| 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.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| 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.
| kurtis_reed wrote:
| My god this title cliche is annoying
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Wordpress specifically ended up in no man's land for us. Not
| powerful enough for big sites with complex content types and
| design systems, and too big of a pain for ephemeral microsites.
| For the latter we switched to Squarespace years ago, and are now
| exploring AI options.
| r1290 wrote:
| 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.
| mossBenchwright wrote:
| A 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
| synergy20 wrote:
| I 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.
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