The CMS is dead, long live the CMS
next.jazzsequence.com
next.jazzsequence.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That being said, I probably will embark on a custom form just because I'm highly opinionated and capable.
We used to call them Enterprise CMS: SiteCore, Squix Matrix (now Squix DXP) and Optimizely (when it was EpiServer) are the ones I've built sites with.
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.
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.
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.
Great system as far as I am concerned - even if I tend to use KirbyCMS for most of my projects.
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.
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
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.
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.
This project has a "shared" backend for the content management and its completely self built. Because there are many clients who use it to edit things its feasible to pay for the hosting.
For a solo project, id be quite interested if someone would build a native editor that can be just hooked with git, so it would make it possible to run the site serverless. Maybe one already exists. "IDE" for static websites.
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.
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?
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.
The Federal government is very large bureaucratic organization with more inertia than most. (And probably long-term contracts in this realm!)
Maybe you'd be surprised by how little some "engineers" know about http cache headers.
With a static site you know the output can be cached indefinitely and only invalidated by a new deploy.
With a server rendered site you can only recreate that by tracking ever piece of data a page is dependent on, tracking data changes, and invalidating any page a data change breaks.
No one does that though, so you may go for SWR or a short-ish cache window so changes take some set of minutes to roll out, looking like the delay in waiting for a static site to rebuild.
I'd never pick between static and server rendered based on caching. Factors like the size of the site, frequency of content updates, and technical skill of content authors (I've never found a git-based CMS I'd ask someone totally nontechnical to use).
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.
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.
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.
Hosting a static site isn't free, they just don't charge you for it early on
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.
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.
A "draft" is a row in a database with live preview. Users can click a button to make a checkpoint (git commit, by GitHub API, but they don't know that). When they click "publish", the PR for their draft is merged.
Writers in my team can use a nice Tiptap editor with custom components. I get the change management of git.
The API for reading content and editing drafts is also exposed over MCP meaning AI can collaborate in the authoring process from anywhere that can connect to MCP.
Loving it so far.
I've built client-side apps that store a GitHub token in localStorage and send them with fetch() for creating Gists and that works fine: https://tools.simonwillison.net/terminal-to-html
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.
But other tools are great as well, like ProcessWire (named above).
If anything, I’d expect more CMS work to occur as the cost of building, migrating, and redesigning sites keeps dropping.
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.
Perhaps what keeps it so dominate in the space is its plugin ecosystem. You can pretty much do anything with it with off the shelf plugins, and a metric fuckton of duct tape. Headless options are way better, but you need to implement stuff yourself. Which of course is a massive barrier in many cases, but when you have the ability to do so, it’s almost always better to do so.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I ended up switching to plain PHP, and it worked great. It is still mostly "static", but I can dynamically include the same content on multiple pages without having to duplicate/build it every time.
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?
>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.
Is that a thing worth mentioning? I abandoned my personal blog a decade ago.
/s but only so slightly.
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
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.
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.)
"Voted "Best Flat File CMS" in 2017, 2019, 2020 & 2021!" :-)
I made a thing [1] a few months ago because I wanted a lightweight expression of this.
Nice turn of a phrase! I was surprised it was a GoogleNope except for you, op.
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.
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.
For example, my blog runs on Grav and I write articles in Markdown on my local PC (more convenient than admin UI for me) and even on the server it all remains file based - it’s reasonably simple, reasonably fast and still allows for dynamic behavior at render/cache time.
Compare that to the slop you get when you have a slow as fuck WP install with a crapload of plugins and the whole thing is brittle and slow and nobody has any idea how to fix it without breaking the current site. If people try applying it to every problem, that’s how you get bad attempts at building complex and bespoke ERP/CRM/e-commerce solutions in a stack that will never be easy or pleasant to work with in those domains.
But surely there is a middle ground - use CMSes where they make sense, reach for other stacks when you need a more generic web app (AI or not). Or heck, use the CMS headless for some parts of the overall thing. Actually, in that regard, I also kinda love Django Admin cause you get a lot out of the box.
This sounds like one of the worst possible uses of generative AI that doesn't directly result in the loss of human life.
I don’t think that will be true.
Note: if you haven’t used Claude since December then you’ve not seen the massive difference in quality code generation. All the studies prior to December are irrelevant.