The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

https://next.jazzsequence.com/posts/the-cms-is-dead-long-live-the-cms

by taubek • 4 months ago

159 98 4 months ago

next.jazzsequence.com

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• 4 months ago

+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!

sdoering2• 4 months ago

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.

bombcar2• 4 months ago

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.

reconnecting2• 4 months ago

First point is the ProcessWire forum (1) — there's a super friendly community always willing to help. Second, there is a developers directory (2).

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.

1. https://processwire.com/talk/

2. https://directory.processwire.com/developers/

wvbdmp• 4 months ago

ProcessWire mentioned! Didn’t expect that in 2026, but yes, I also use it a lot. Sites just keep chugging.

rastographics• 4 months ago

+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

NetOpWibby3• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

fg1372• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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?

sdoering2• 4 months ago

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).

snowwrestler3• 4 months ago

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.

Gagarin1917• 4 months ago

Not to mention the amount of online stores that Wordpress and its plugins power. Vibe coding that would be insanity when solutions already exist.

fg1372• 4 months ago

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?

sarchertech2• 4 months ago

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.

bombcar2• 4 months ago

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.

justsomehnguy• 4 months ago

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.

simonw4• 4 months ago

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.

pjmlp2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

huijzer3• 4 months ago

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.

huijzer3• 4 months ago

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

simonw4• 4 months ago

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.

pjmlp2• 4 months ago

CMS is pretty much alive, even if most of them are now headless, oriented towards MACH deployments and AI based workflows.

christoff12• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

nchmy2• 4 months ago

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?

tappio3• 4 months ago

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.

jeromegv2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

Are you planning on having just simple content as markdown files, or your own database + CMS?

tappio3• 4 months ago

For some personal projects in the past I have used google sheets and cloudflare workers, I guess it could be called CMS, but it was quite restricted of course.

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.

allpratik• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

ceejayoz3• 4 months ago

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?

nchmy2• 4 months ago

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)

tappio3• 4 months ago

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.

coldtea2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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)

weitendorf3• 4 months ago

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

jasomill2• 4 months ago

I’m confused. Static sites are the opposite of the target market for CMS. Even assuming consistent behavior from an LLM that never makes mistakes, how does your system handle access control, or multiple users submitting, reviewing, and publishing content to the site simultaneously?

ymolodtsov• 4 months ago

Static website use headless CMS to give a more pleasant and mobile-friendly UI. I always deploy with SveltiaCMS.

jqbd• 4 months ago

Free plans on GitHub don't technically allow commercial use

torm• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

I'm a fan of Concrete CMS. No plans to switch away, and yes I am working with AI.

lizardking• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

nothinkjustai2• 4 months ago

Wordpress gets you into trouble all the time imo. There are better solutions out there. Every headless cms I’ve used has been much less of a headache compared to Wordpress. I wish I could share your optimism on it, but man, it’s a real pain.

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.

JodieBenitez2• 4 months ago

Wordpress is the reliable dude who looks boringly normal, but on the other hand never gets you into trouble.

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...

donohoe• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

coldtea2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

dwd• 4 months ago

There's a new name for all that these days: Digital Experience Platform (DXP)

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.

jiggunjer• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

weitendorf3• 4 months ago

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.

helsinkiandrew• 4 months ago

85% of Wordpress users are businesses with less than 50 employees [1], in most cases it will be one person who is uploading and managing content and fighting with the config they don’t really understand. There’s a huge number of businesses filling a real need of making simpler versions of products (whether Wordpress, mailchimp, shopping). AI is just the latest version of that

[1] https://enlyft.com/tech/products/wordpress

jillesvangurp• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

My god this title cliche is annoying

snowwrestler3• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

ChicagoDave2• 4 months ago

Code is ephemeral. Apps are going to be replaced instead of maintained. GenAI has changed every part of software engineering and enterprise application acquisition.

jasomill2• 4 months ago

I don't understand. You're proposing a future where bugs are replaced with entirely new sets of bugs instead of fixed?

This sounds like one of the worst possible uses of generative AI that doesn't directly result in the loss of human life.

ChicagoDave2• 4 months ago

Well you make the assumption the new code will be worse.

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.

nothinkjustai2• 4 months ago

ofrzeta2• 4 months ago

For a while flat-file CMSs where all the rage. I've been using Grav for a while, it is based on (markdown) files as well but also has a GUI and a comparatively large community. https://getgrav.org/

"Voted "Best Flat File CMS" in 2017, 2019, 2020 & 2021!" :-)

nkko• 4 months ago

What happened in 2022?

ofrzeta2• 4 months ago

Starting with 2022 Statamic became the winner.

phplovesong• 4 months ago

CMS will probably always have its place. This is actully how PHP became popular. From all PHP deployments in 2026 WordPress alone is somewhere in the 80% ballpark (meaning near all PHP projects is WP).

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.

oortcrate_1• 4 months ago

The 'CMS is dead' take usually ignores the reality of working with non-engineers. You can't expect a content editor to push a git commit just to fix a typo. The complexity of building a reliable WYSIWYG or a preview layer is way higher than it looks at first. For me, a good CMS is basically 'complexity insurance' for the team.

KronisLV• 4 months ago

I might have outdated views here but personally I think that a lot of the sites out there could benefit from having a CMS but at the same time that often won’t mean WordPress of all the options out there.

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.

XCSme• 4 months ago

I tried using Astro for https://aibenchy.com, initially it went great, but then I got into static-website limitations (such as dynamically generating all comparison pages, which would been generating N^4 pages, where N is the number of tested models).

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.

The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

Related Stories