5 ms·

The CMS is in a renaissance period with Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and the like falling out of favor. I believe the CMS is bifurcating into two specialized dire

The CMS is in a renaissance period with Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and the like falling out of favor. I believe the CMS is bifurcating into two specialized directions. Several online publishers are coming out and describing their new, home-grown custom CMS. The features are rich and provide robust, innovative tools across the long-form content lifecycle: writing, editing, and publication. There is special attention to collaboration. On the other hand, more and more website developers align themselves with the goals and properties of static site generators. SSGs are best suited what I call "malleable" websites. Thus, I think the way to think about this CMS renaissance is that traditional the CMS tried (and failed) to optimize for both long-form content and the malleable website. As a result, people are sick of trying to patch the traditional CMS with plugin after plugin and instead are simply crafting their own.

iancarroll 12y ago
> The CMS is in a renaissance period with Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and the like falling out of favor. I think Wordpress is still going to stay in the game. It still has a road ahead of it. I do think that the big newsrooms are going to expand past it's limiting multiple-people collaboration features into a new CMS, but most blogs will want to use WP.
snowwrestler 12y ago
I don't know about Joomla but Wordpress and Drupal are hardly falling out of favor; they're actually both growing quite rapidly. Developing a custom CMS makes sense for exactly one type of company: a publisher whose entire business depends on their CMS. For companies in that situation, developing a custom CMS is a capital investment in their core product. Everyone else will save time, money, and security headaches by building on a popular open source platform. Heck even Twitter uses Drupal to power their developer site.
- BrandonSmith 12y ago
  Ironically, I've heard the argument that, for the malleable website case, most people will save time, money, and security headaches by avoiding the traditional CMS. My point is that the traditional CMS is falling out of favor as the default solution for content on the Web. Need a blog? Wordpress is increasingly NOT the solution. As developers, we are trending away from the one-size-fits-all CMS and into specialized categories of CMS. The CMS renaissance is due to two factors: 1) A proliferation of great tools emerging into a toolchain ecosystems. Node's Grunt and Gulp are fine examples. This is largely different than the traditional CMS because... 2) Developers are increasingly wanting to gain more control over our craft.
  - gexla 12y ago
    No way, building a custom CMS for a site which would have always been a good candidate for an off-the-shelf CMS is just as bad of an idea today as it ever has been. > As developers, we are trending away from the one-size-fits-all CMS and into specialized categories of CMS. Most of the sites which would typically get built on Drupal (and especially Wordpress) aren't owned by developers. Further, these owners probably don't even have a developer on staff or even on a maintenance retainer. Many of these sites are setup by relatively non-technical users. Many of these sites are setup by a developer the owner has paid and then that developer is out of the picture to be run by the owner. Even if you are a start-up building your own web app, it still often doesn't make sense to build your own blogging system. Rather, you would get your first version out the door ASAP, throw your blog up on a sub-domain running Wordpress and then maybe down the road figure out something different. Do what you want for your own site. But when you are doing something for clients who don't have a tech staff, it's not about what the developer wants.
    - BrandonSmith 12y ago
      I agree that building a custom CMS is not the right answer in most circumstances. I'm not advocating building custom CMS. My position is that what has "always been a good candidate for an off-the-shelf CMS" is evolving. The traditional CMS will be losing ground at the high and low ends. On the high-end, long-form content organizations striving to differentiate are building their own systems focused on collaboration and content lifecycle features and, on the low-end, static site generators for custom websites. There is a middle, but the middle, over time, appears to be shrinking.
- knieveltech 12y ago
  None of the metrics I've seen outside of Acquia marketing materials suggest Drupal is growing. Developer engagement plateaued a couple years ago if Google keyword searches and module issue queues are anything to go by. The number of purely Drupal dev shops have plummeted over the last few years. Job postings (locally and elsewhere) appear to be limited to well-established large enterprise and .edu, and regional shops that service these markets. Wordpress, on the other hand, appears to be on fire.
  - snowwrestler 12y ago
    Drupal and Wordpress are growing in different ways. Drupal is growing into more complex, higher-cost-per-project jobs that would have gone to big ticket closed source CMS platforms a few years ago. And Wordpress is growing into the mid-size jobs that Drupal and Joomla used to be the only option for. By any metric of public popularity, Wordpress is growing a lot faster than Drupal. Drupal's growth is into the enterprise arena which is not as public. The number of purely Drupal shops is dropping because pretty much every agency of note had added Drupal to their stable of solutions. It's not an esoteric differentiator anymore--which is actually a form of growth for the platform.
  - dreamfactory2 12y ago
    The number of Drupal core contributors has shot up from the hundreds to the thousands over the past couple of years
smacktoward 12y ago
I would humbly suggest that static site generators are not nearly as popular as you might think if you only view the CMS market through the eyes of the HN crowd. SSGs are hugely popular among nerds and practically unknown among everybody else. The result is a kind of distortion where, to nerds, it looks like SSGs are about to take over the world -- "all my friends use them!" But step outside that tight network of people and they are more or less completely off the radar.
- BrandonSmith 12y ago
  Ah, don't forget that HN-types determine the future direction of products, services, and tools. If that weren't true, what are we all doing here?
  - grrowl 12y ago
    The market determines the future directions of products, services, and tools. While HN-types deliver them, by-the-numbers, they usually fail.
- chestnut-tree 12y ago
  I agree - I find the idea of static site generators (SSGs) very appealing, but they are not user-friendly to setup - unless you happen to be technically-minded. Some tell-tale signs that SSGs are made by programmers for other programmers: command line-installation and configuration, a liking for markdown (and a dislike for WYSIWYG). Just to be clear, I'm not knocking any of this. The fact that people have put their own time and effort into building SSGs and then generously open sourced them is pretty awesome. In my view, the audience for SSGs, whether intentional or not, is mostly other programmers. What would it take to make an SSG appeal to a broader set of users?
  - edavis 12y ago
    > What would it take to make an SSG appeal to a broader set of users? I don't think the SSG, as they largely exist today, will ever gain widespread usage by mainstream users. But one thing that could drive greater adoption would be to develop an aesthetically pleasing web front-end that lets users write content using familiar WYSIWYG tools, but save the content to local files instead of a database. From there, the process would be largely the same as it is now: transform this directory of lightly marked up plain text files into raw HTML. So, to answer your question: Make it more like Wordpress.
programminggeek 12y ago
Wordpress is not falling out of favor. If anything it's eating the lunch of a lot of previously custom or nonexistant CMS solutions. For small business, it's just getting started.
snide 12y ago
Heh. You might find my CMS (http://www.webhook.com http://www.webhook.com) funny then. It's a CMS based on static-site-generator concepts... it deploys static websites for example and is easy to use and malleable. However it still has a firebase backend and a traditional /cms/ page with all the modern trappings you'd expect. So I kind of went for both :)
- BrandonSmith 12y ago
  Ooohh. I like where your head is with webhook.com. (How did you get that domain!) I would have backed your campaign had I been exposed to it. Any way to join late? Alright... hear me out... thoughts on combining webhook.com with Atom as a single download/install. There are custom Atom packages that provide UI to achieve what you are doing through the CLI. Preview locally, too.
  - snide 12y ago
    I bought the domain along with webhook.org awhile ago. They were surprisingly inexpensive. If you'd like to get in, just send me an email dave@webhook.com and reference this post. Atom stuff sounds like a neat idea, but I'd rather not tie us to any specific editor. Obviously people can write whatever they want though. We plan on open sourcing most of the code.
- sondr3 12y ago
  Any news regarding hosting this yourself? I remember this being asked a few times, but I'm curious if your stance has changed since.
  - snide 12y ago
    It's still roughly the same answer. Likely later this year. Certainly not from lack of want! More just because you'd have to sign up / install so many different services: firebase, elastic search, app engine for image resizing, mailgun or something for emails. There's just a lot of pieces.
darylteo 12y ago
Take any normal CMS, cache the html, and you have a static site generator.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  Exactly. My favorite static site generator is Varnish.
pknight 12y ago
Do you have any data that actually indicates a move away from off the shelf cms-es? There is always a case for building a custom CMS and some companies go that route. That has been case since the WP/Joomla/Drupals off the world came into existence. I don't see a trend though, in fact I think all 3 of those are growing. For some companies a custom CMS just makes the most sense. It doesn't really reflect anything on the off-the-shelf cms-es. And static site generators are not exactly taking off like crazy either, in terms of growth. Choice is always good though. In that respect, I agree that there is a renaissance There are lots of great ways to run a site now. There are some nice looking CMS platforms and the popular platforms continue to mature as well. It's good stuff all around.
talas9 12y ago
OS tools such as WP, Drupal, et al aren't even remotely in the same class of app as Scoop, or those built by various other online pubs (exa: Salon), nor are they "new", some have roots going back five and ten plus years in the respective org. The conclusion is way off base and ill informed; early digital pubs recognized immediately that OS CMS systems and blogware weren't going to cut it and brewed their own tech (a few of which were subjected to attempted productization, which inevitably failed, exa: vignette storyserver), and nothing's really changed in that regard. know your history before you declare a renaissance, mm-kay

iancarroll 12y ago

> The CMS is in a renaissance period with Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and the like falling out of favor. I think Wordpress is still going to stay in the game. It still has a road ahead of it. I do think that the big newsrooms are going to expand past it's limiting multiple-people collaboration features into a new CMS, but most blogs will want to use WP.

snowwrestler 12y ago

I don't know about Joomla but Wordpress and Drupal are hardly falling out of favor; they're actually both growing quite rapidly. Developing a custom CMS makes sense for exactly one type of company: a publisher whose entire business depends on their CMS. For companies in that situation, developing a custom CMS is a capital investment in their core product. Everyone else will save time, money, and security headaches by building on a popular open source platform. Heck even Twitter uses Drupal to power their developer site.

BrandonSmith 12y ago
Ironically, I've heard the argument that, for the malleable website case, most people will save time, money, and security headaches by avoiding the traditional CMS. My point is that the traditional CMS is falling out of favor as the default solution for content on the Web. Need a blog? Wordpress is increasingly NOT the solution. As developers, we are trending away from the one-size-fits-all CMS and into specialized categories of CMS. The CMS renaissance is due to two factors: 1) A proliferation of great tools emerging into a toolchain ecosystems. Node's Grunt and Gulp are fine examples. This is largely different than the traditional CMS because... 2) Developers are increasingly wanting to gain more control over our craft.
- gexla 12y ago
  No way, building a custom CMS for a site which would have always been a good candidate for an off-the-shelf CMS is just as bad of an idea today as it ever has been. > As developers, we are trending away from the one-size-fits-all CMS and into specialized categories of CMS. Most of the sites which would typically get built on Drupal (and especially Wordpress) aren't owned by developers. Further, these owners probably don't even have a developer on staff or even on a maintenance retainer. Many of these sites are setup by relatively non-technical users. Many of these sites are setup by a developer the owner has paid and then that developer is out of the picture to be run by the owner. Even if you are a start-up building your own web app, it still often doesn't make sense to build your own blogging system. Rather, you would get your first version out the door ASAP, throw your blog up on a sub-domain running Wordpress and then maybe down the road figure out something different. Do what you want for your own site. But when you are doing something for clients who don't have a tech staff, it's not about what the developer wants.
  - BrandonSmith 12y ago
    I agree that building a custom CMS is not the right answer in most circumstances. I'm not advocating building custom CMS. My position is that what has "always been a good candidate for an off-the-shelf CMS" is evolving. The traditional CMS will be losing ground at the high and low ends. On the high-end, long-form content organizations striving to differentiate are building their own systems focused on collaboration and content lifecycle features and, on the low-end, static site generators for custom websites. There is a middle, but the middle, over time, appears to be shrinking.
knieveltech 12y ago
None of the metrics I've seen outside of Acquia marketing materials suggest Drupal is growing. Developer engagement plateaued a couple years ago if Google keyword searches and module issue queues are anything to go by. The number of purely Drupal dev shops have plummeted over the last few years. Job postings (locally and elsewhere) appear to be limited to well-established large enterprise and .edu, and regional shops that service these markets. Wordpress, on the other hand, appears to be on fire.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  Drupal and Wordpress are growing in different ways. Drupal is growing into more complex, higher-cost-per-project jobs that would have gone to big ticket closed source CMS platforms a few years ago. And Wordpress is growing into the mid-size jobs that Drupal and Joomla used to be the only option for. By any metric of public popularity, Wordpress is growing a lot faster than Drupal. Drupal's growth is into the enterprise arena which is not as public. The number of purely Drupal shops is dropping because pretty much every agency of note had added Drupal to their stable of solutions. It's not an esoteric differentiator anymore--which is actually a form of growth for the platform.
- dreamfactory2 12y ago
  The number of Drupal core contributors has shot up from the hundreds to the thousands over the past couple of years

smacktoward 12y ago

I would humbly suggest that static site generators are not nearly as popular as you might think if you only view the CMS market through the eyes of the HN crowd. SSGs are hugely popular among nerds and practically unknown among everybody else. The result is a kind of distortion where, to nerds, it looks like SSGs are about to take over the world -- "all my friends use them!" But step outside that tight network of people and they are more or less completely off the radar.

BrandonSmith 12y ago
Ah, don't forget that HN-types determine the future direction of products, services, and tools. If that weren't true, what are we all doing here?
- grrowl 12y ago
  The market determines the future directions of products, services, and tools. While HN-types deliver them, by-the-numbers, they usually fail.
chestnut-tree 12y ago
I agree - I find the idea of static site generators (SSGs) very appealing, but they are not user-friendly to setup - unless you happen to be technically-minded. Some tell-tale signs that SSGs are made by programmers for other programmers: command line-installation and configuration, a liking for markdown (and a dislike for WYSIWYG). Just to be clear, I'm not knocking any of this. The fact that people have put their own time and effort into building SSGs and then generously open sourced them is pretty awesome. In my view, the audience for SSGs, whether intentional or not, is mostly other programmers. What would it take to make an SSG appeal to a broader set of users?
- edavis 12y ago
  > What would it take to make an SSG appeal to a broader set of users? I don't think the SSG, as they largely exist today, will ever gain widespread usage by mainstream users. But one thing that could drive greater adoption would be to develop an aesthetically pleasing web front-end that lets users write content using familiar WYSIWYG tools, but save the content to local files instead of a database. From there, the process would be largely the same as it is now: transform this directory of lightly marked up plain text files into raw HTML. So, to answer your question: Make it more like Wordpress.

programminggeek 12y ago

Wordpress is not falling out of favor. If anything it's eating the lunch of a lot of previously custom or nonexistant CMS solutions. For small business, it's just getting started.

snide 12y ago

Heh. You might find my CMS (http://www.webhook.com http://www.webhook.com) funny then. It's a CMS based on static-site-generator concepts... it deploys static websites for example and is easy to use and malleable. However it still has a firebase backend and a traditional /cms/ page with all the modern trappings you'd expect. So I kind of went for both :)

BrandonSmith 12y ago
Ooohh. I like where your head is with webhook.com. (How did you get that domain!) I would have backed your campaign had I been exposed to it. Any way to join late? Alright... hear me out... thoughts on combining webhook.com with Atom as a single download/install. There are custom Atom packages that provide UI to achieve what you are doing through the CLI. Preview locally, too.
- snide 12y ago
  I bought the domain along with webhook.org awhile ago. They were surprisingly inexpensive. If you'd like to get in, just send me an email dave@webhook.com and reference this post. Atom stuff sounds like a neat idea, but I'd rather not tie us to any specific editor. Obviously people can write whatever they want though. We plan on open sourcing most of the code.
sondr3 12y ago
Any news regarding hosting this yourself? I remember this being asked a few times, but I'm curious if your stance has changed since.
- snide 12y ago
  It's still roughly the same answer. Likely later this year. Certainly not from lack of want! More just because you'd have to sign up / install so many different services: firebase, elastic search, app engine for image resizing, mailgun or something for emails. There's just a lot of pieces.

darylteo 12y ago

Take any normal CMS, cache the html, and you have a static site generator.

snowwrestler 12y ago
Exactly. My favorite static site generator is Varnish.

pknight 12y ago

Do you have any data that actually indicates a move away from off the shelf cms-es? There is always a case for building a custom CMS and some companies go that route. That has been case since the WP/Joomla/Drupals off the world came into existence. I don't see a trend though, in fact I think all 3 of those are growing. For some companies a custom CMS just makes the most sense. It doesn't really reflect anything on the off-the-shelf cms-es. And static site generators are not exactly taking off like crazy either, in terms of growth. Choice is always good though. In that respect, I agree that there is a renaissance There are lots of great ways to run a site now. There are some nice looking CMS platforms and the popular platforms continue to mature as well. It's good stuff all around.

talas9 12y ago

OS tools such as WP, Drupal, et al aren't even remotely in the same class of app as Scoop, or those built by various other online pubs (exa: Salon), nor are they "new", some have roots going back five and ten plus years in the respective org. The conclusion is way off base and ill informed; early digital pubs recognized immediately that OS CMS systems and blogware weren't going to cut it and brewed their own tech (a few of which were subjected to attempted productization, which inevitably failed, exa: vignette storyserver), and nothing's really changed in that regard. know your history before you declare a renaissance, mm-kay