I think timing is big here. These content management systems came out at just the right time and they have had a long period to evolve and further entrench thei

I think timing is big here. These content management systems came out at just the right time and they have had a long period to evolve and further entrench their market positions. At the time these things came out, even basic features were a big deal. PHP was the only platform which was easy to deploy on shared hosting (VPS and cloud were unknown terms at that time.) Today these systems occupy a niche where there is enough demand to give them a seriously high profile on the web but the space isn't compelling enough to make developers spend a lot of time here. There also isn't compelling reasons for consumers to switch away from the big players. Today, I think the CMS is an aging idea.It seems that every day I see some new component or service which I could just drop in to an app to build as another piece to building a custom CMS. Eventually it may be as easy to create a custom CMS as it is to configure an existing one today. Not that it's not already easy to throw something together with just Rails and some add-ons. You can get a long way with Rails barely even knowing Ruby. Also, as we move closer to an API web with a client (mobile and web) heavy in JS consuming JSON, then a CMS probably needs to change quite a bit to stay useful. The CMS would basically just be a publishing tool to create content for the API. It would be less useful for creating layouts and generally dealing with the front-end. Mobile would need something else entirely. I don't think these things are going to go anywhere for a long time. The niche need will be slow to die. But I just don't see a big opportunity for putting in the hard effort of creating one now. The available systems are largely good enough.