

CMS trends for 2014 - audriusarj
http://despreneur.com/cms-trends-for-2014/

======
bbx
I'm slighly confused by the article's premise ("2014 will be the Content’s
year") and it mentioning tools such as Wix, Squarespace, or even Macaw, who
can't be considered as CMS but rather complete website builders.

Apart from its templating system and its vibrant community, one of WordPress'
strengths is sticking to an admin interface that _is_ actually focused on
content: simple form elements and a decent WYSIWYG.

Drag & drop and in-­place editing are technically impressive but don't belong
in a CMS: I don't see editors and website owners using it on daily basis to
update and manage their content.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
I think the biggest hurdle we still face when it comes to online publishing is
the clash between WYSIWYG and structured markup. Editors, in my experience,
don't like working with structured content. But the web is not WYSIWYG. Tools
like markdown attempt a compromise, but are still not suitable for many non-
technical editors. Do we need a mind-shift, or a new piece of technology to
solve this?

~~~
rartichoke
Yeah this is the main problem but I don't think it's really fixable in the
near future.

There's 3 types of content:

\- Arbitrary written content

This is where markdown shines and IMO completely solves content creation.

\- Arbitrary written content with mixed in assets

Nothing works here. Ever try floating some text to the right of an image when
you don't have access to CSS or the raw html because we have to assume the
content creator has no technical knowledge.

Even wordpress fails horribly at this but it's such a common thing you want to
do.

\- Structured content that has clear properties

This is pretty easy to design a nice UI for because it's no longer "anything".
For example a todo item or a photo that belongs to a gallery. All you have to
do in this case is create a form field for each property. It's something a
non-technical person could do.

~~~
bbx

      - Arbitrary written content with mixed in assets
    
      Nothing works here.
    

You're right. Offering a simple way for a non-technical user to manage
(locally) his layout is the challenge of most WYSIWYG.

I don't use Medium but was quite impressed by this quick demo:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO8hysXMfvQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO8hysXMfvQ)

Check out around 2:00 how images are inserted within the text. The interface
works because it offers only 3-4 possibilities: zoomed in/normal size, full
width/left float. Also, there are only 2 levels of heading.

This limited interface is a great compromise between a content-focused
experience, and some layout flexibility.

~~~
rartichoke
The demo looks good but look how much fiddling he had to do to get the images
the way he wanted them at certain points. There are so many little quirks that
you can't really solve intuitively, you end up having to brute force a
solution every time.

He even dealt with a number of non-image quirks and he probably coded the
editor. Like when the paragraph and header were both bolded and he had to go
back and fix it.

Medium is also highly targeted to blog posts too. A lot of non-technical users
somehow want the ability to edit the content on the pages of their web site
that might have fairly complicated markup/css to get the desired result.

~~~
X4
You can solve the fiddling by replacing the whole UI with markdown. Oh, how
will he push images to his liking then? Easy: {{image: cat2.jpg, left}} Ok.
and howto make it fit the page and baseline without stretching out of the
aspect ratio? {{image: cat2.jpg, fit}} Make a button for that like the
Left,Centered,Right aligned text buttons and you're done. Even better remove
the button and make the whole shit context sensitive, so that after dragging a
picture you can do actions on it without having to mess with drag&drop. People
don't get drag&drop, really, just trust me here. Most people aren't as aware
as you about drag&drop and it doesn't always work too. Buttons help.

But yeah TinyMCE is DEAD.

~~~
rartichoke
Yeah I definitely agree with the drag/drop method not being popular for a lot
of people. I'm not sure why, I guess it's because most people were brought up
with "open the file dialog and pick the file".

If it were that simple there would be more good editors around. You should try
to prototype what you're talking about and open source it, maybe it will gain
traction if it's implemented well.

~~~
X4
Thanks for the motivation, I'll have some more thought on that and try to
implement it.

------
rartichoke
I always thought the C stood for compromise because that's almost always what
you have to do when you use a CMS.

I don't think the future is drag/drop codeless systems. Good luck when your
clients ask for very specific work flows that you can't bundle up in a pretty
little draggable box!

Then get sad when you realize you have to dive deep into the code except now
you're dealing with a 100,000+ line codebase that you didn't write or even
worse a large plugin that some random dude wrote which has the worst coding
practices possible.

------
theboywho
The article doesn't mention API based CMSes, which are IMO a better approach
to content management.

[http://prismic.io](http://prismic.io) seems promising.

~~~
justincormack
Yeah I think the main omission was the whole trend towards markdown/git/api
based "CMS" which basically means that most tech people have junked the whole
idea of a traditional CMS, few of which have an API though there is CMIS.

~~~
X4
Wrong. Personally for me a dead end criteria is a CMS without an API. But you
mean most people don't need it right? I also think that's not right, because
many companies want Mobile Apps, Intranet tools etc. and integrating their
crap with the CMS through an API makes a whole lot sense.

I looked at [http://prismic.io](http://prismic.io), but I haven't found
anything that's opensource and comes close to it. Do you know something like
that?

~~~
justincormack
No not saying most people dont need it, they are a reducing pool, the people
who do need it have moved away already.

~~~
X4
>> […] people who do need it have moved away already.

hmm, what do you mean and to which platform?

I was thinking of enterprise users and companies who mostly start with a cheap
cms, then add features here and there then an app, then an intranet thingy and
at the end you have a spaghetti architecture, because everything has it's own
front-end without a unifying API. It's rare that developers write their own
solutions, you can say, hey nobody would do that, but the reality is far from
that. Most devs simply use what's there and try to integrate different
projects "by their own way".

I found some things that can be done better at prismic.io and think there is
some wasted potential there.

\- It requires writing your own controller that needs to implement caching or
you have a 500ms delay for API requests

\- No multilanguage from the beginning (gotta bake your own solution, that's
not so fun)

\- Slugs for objects in collections are ugly (see blog example)

Here are all REST API based "CMS", unfortunately, none of them is actually
perfect.
[http://www.programmableweb.com/apitag/CMS?protocol=REST](http://www.programmableweb.com/apitag/CMS?protocol=REST)

------
ericcholis
I'd personally include the upswing on static site generators. Not exactly a
traditional CMS, but still a system that manages content.

In particular, I'd site NPR's work on their static site process:

[http://blog.apps.npr.org/2013/02/14/app-template-
redux.html](http://blog.apps.npr.org/2013/02/14/app-template-redux.html)

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
NPR stuff looks good, but their focus (from an initial skim) appears to be we
apps - correct? That might be running before we can walk - how about getting
all content-driven sites (blogs, portfolios, etc.) onto SSGs first - I think
that's where the really big wins are.

~~~
ericcholis
Yes, I'd say that their sites fit into more of an "app" category. More
reading, for the curious:

[http://blog.apps.npr.org/2013/09/13/using-a-static-site-
to-c...](http://blog.apps.npr.org/2013/09/13/using-a-static-site-to-
crowdsource-playgrounds.html)

------
Joeboy
A friend just asked me about doing a website for her bicycle repair business,
and after thinking about it I thought that what I would like is a docker
container that runs a lightweight httpd for serving static pages, a git server
to allow her to push updates, and probably a simple web interface for
deploying them. That way after the initial deployment my involvement should be
pretty minimal. Maybe something like it already exists?

Edit: [http://hyde.github.io/](http://hyde.github.io/) looks like it might be
a good starting point for something like the above, with bonus static site
generation, markdown etc.

------
wyck
This article is horribly flat, once again bundling a blanket term "CMS" to
apply to multiple needs and applications, and then using a great title like
"Trends"....In essence this post is blogspam.

------
actionscripted
> Next year WordPress will still be a leader.

> 2014 will be yet another year of doing more while writing less
> code...Webydo, Froont or Macaw

Yeah right. As someone who'd consider themselves a WordPress expert and has
been building clients sites with it (and other OSS offerings like Magento) for
a long time there is no way in hell someone is going to use a WYSIWYG builder
to create WordPress themes/sites.

If WordPress is the leader, maybe the argument that there is less code writing
going on is a general one that means folks are using the CMS with plugins
instead of rolling their own solutions -- where clicks replace code, in a
sense. But you or someone else still needs to build the templates, customize
the admin, register functions and nav and widgets, etc.

I suppose if you're really hell-bent on building a site with WordPress without
coding you could like at a DMS add-on like PageLines but really, for most work
with WordPress, you're writing code at some point.

------
grimmdude
"From writing code we will move to dragging and dropping, having everything
visual and instant."

Sure, if he says so...

------
toddmorey
I had to do a double-take on Wix. (Even went to look at the numbers myself.) I
had no idea that it had 1 Billion + in market cap. That's crazy impressive for
a company in the crowded website builder space.

Edit: Back in August (most recent numbers I found), they had 679,536 paid
subscriptions. That's insane.

------
parag_c_mehta
I am not sure about the future of these "website builders". They have been
around a long time, however for anything serious they almost/always
disappoint.

------
lcnmrn
His examples are exactly what's wrong with content management systems. They're
too complex. I'm trying to build an insanely simple system at
[http://markdawn.com/](http://markdawn.com/) which emphasis content in a very
strong way — content and only content.

I'm really working to make the interface as invisible as possible and mobile
(iPhone) first. I hope I can get an API out in 2014, then it can be integrate
with all Markdown editors and apps out there. It's cloud hosting for your
Markdown files.

------
jeffehobbs
I am a little tiny bit dumber for having read this.

------
danso
One static site generator that I recently discovered and plan to make frequent
use of next year is Middleman (Ruby), which is like Jekyll, except less
focused on blogging and more app-like conveniences...for example, being able
to use erb rather than going through Liquid:

[http://middlemanapp.com/](http://middlemanapp.com/)

Overall, I'd like to see static-site generators become more widespread as an
option. I've seen a few great sites/products recently in which the developer
felt they needed to deploy a Wordpress instance even though their site was
little more than a landing page and a few about pages. The less friction there
is to getting content up, the easier it is to be motivated to create content.

~~~
matthewmacleod
I'm a big fan of Middleman too. Means I can use Haml, Sass, CoffeeScript etc.
along with various Ruby view helpers to keep the templates tidy, then build
the whole thing as part of the deployment process. Blog posts are in Markdown,
which is even better, and the whole thing has live reloading. Very slick
development process.

I wonder if it would be possible to build a CMS-alike on top of Middleman -
something with a web interface to manage the content, edit templates and
scripts etc., but using Middleman to generate a static site when changes are
pushed. I guess it's another thing to add to the list…

~~~
danso
This is not inherently related to Middleman, but I'm hugely grateful to it
because through Middleman, I stumbled on to Slim, which is a nicer-looking
Haml alternative that even allows Markdown. I've started using it in my Rails
app and that alone was a game-changing improvement.

The way that Middleman can be so easily extended with plugins and gems the way
that a Sinatra app can, while still maintaining the simplicity of a static
app...It's really a breakthrough for me.

