Is there a compelling reason to even use a CMS at all anymore? I feel like the majority moved on well over a decade ago.
Is it just the last remaining pockets of "that kind" of web dev?
Is there a compelling reason to even use a CMS at all anymore? I feel like the majority moved on well over a decade ago.
Is it just the last remaining pockets of "that kind" of web dev?
Yes, usually when you have a team and need governance over users / content / state. i.e. a publishing workflow that might have specific regulatory review requirements etc.
We're finding that this is becoming even more critical when users are using agents and the scale of changes / publishing increases. Pair that with things like AI regulations that require records of human providence etc, and a CMS becomes even more important.
In my experience, unless your non-dev CMS contributors are strictly filling in blanks with text (sometimes not even then), much of the work ends up delegated to the devs anyway. They are much better off working on a static build that deploys from CI pipelines in gitlab/github.
The benefits are massive ranging from better versioning, free choice of any tools under the sun, strict access control far away from people who don't even understand text encoding, clean CDN deployments, complete elimination of clunky SSR and its footguns, more precise control of the web server configuration, etc.
It's very rare nowadays to see any web devs who don't know the "full stack" from bare Apache/Nginx up to React (or even writing the exact necessary modern plain HTML/CSS/JS). That's why I distinguished the devs who prefer a CMS as "that kind of web dev".
This shift happened in the mid-2010s and I don't know anyone who ever looked back unless they're stuck slow-maintaining something older from before that point in time.
Licensing a CMS now seems like a pointless middleman cost for a subpar product from a time before we had good web standards that were well understood and supported. Every CMS sales pitch seems to be aimed squarely at middle management fearmongering for the most trivial and basic stuff any web dev already knows how to do a lot more efficiently and reliably without a CMS. All devs I see now have experience with these standards using more modern tools at large scale and with the full SDLC and business requirements in mind for over a decade.
> much of the work ends up delegated to the devs anyway
For many implementations though, requiring a dev to make the changes is the failure state.
I love static builds and use them all the time when they're the right fit for the project, but in many cases they are not. I'm also finding that I'm starting to lean towards a CMS more even when it's "just me", but I have a team of agents. i.e. I want the ability to have a voice conversation with a dot / grok bot / etc. and have it update content without it having the ability to do dev type things.
It's the inverted pyramid that has always been sort of Drupal's niche... a small number of all sites, but a large percent of the largest sites in the world.
And fortunately those of us in tech, the amount of software in the world is exploding so all those lanes are getting bigger, even within their niche.
Thanks for clarifying. I think you're suggesting that there's an "excluded middle" customer that I've just never seen in real life.
> It's very rare nowadays to see any web devs who don't know the "full stack" from bare Apache/Nginx up to React
citation needed. Pretty much every single React/JS front end dev I've dealt with, doesn't know, understand, or care about the web server aspect itself "Not my problem".
> Is it just the last remaining pockets of "that kind" of web dev?
You mean the kind of development that powers nearly the entire web?
Unless we're talking about figma-like web apps, Content is usually a different department than development.
I know it's becoming more and more outdated nowadays, but if a magazine or a news website is still written by humans rather than AI they need a way to provide formatted text and media, and preview the output.
On the other hand I should add that i've also seen an upward growth in CMSes like WordPress being used exclusively as Online Editors, with content ultimately being exported trough REST to completely different backends and frontends, like a Firebase/NextJS infra.
I'd argue that content written by non-humans makes this even more important. You still likely have a need for a publishing / review workflow & attribution and a way to ensure standards are enforced and not just left to the end-user's own judgement.
Separating delivery from content management also reinforces this. Set up a governed content / user workflow and then let an agent focus on just the presentation after pulling in the content. I'd say this extends well beyond rest as well. A user interacting with something like a voice assistant in an agent might actually be using many interfaces at once (mcp from the assistant, HTML in a card, WebMCP alongside the HTML, browser open on another device for the human.) When that happens you want one canoninical system for the content.
40% of web sites run WordPress. And there's tons of other CMSes out there as well, so I don't think the majority have moved on.
Moved on from a cms? No, they’re more used than ever before.
websites are still made out of content, I think?