Content Management Systems (CMS) are here to stay. In a relatively short time, this industry has made some significant changes over the past 25+ years. You needed a rocket scientist and an editor to deliver web pages back then. Nowadays, a CMS is a household application for every business, and non-technical users can do significantly more without engaging a development team. Progress, right there.
However, talking to enterprises in the market for a new CMS, I find the requirements they have for the new vendor not very shocking. This has been consistent for the past ten years. Surprisingly enough, these enterprises were not replatforming from an old-school CMS solution. Even more recent versions of modern CMS solutions didn’t fit the bill. It’s not just the monolithic solutions, even the composable / MACH players.
Let’s dig deeper into these common pain points and how they should be overcome.
Developer Dependencies
While much progress has been made in the past 20-ish years, this is the most common issue we encounter and comes in many shapes and forms. NoCode should be the norm now, where business users can go about their day-to-day operations without any developer dependence. This is a double-edged sword, and when properly addressed, the NoCode paradigm empowers business users and technology teams. If core CMS activities like page composition, building custom content approval workflows and making changes in page layouts & styling require a developer in your current CMS, we need to talk.
Content Delivery
Delivering content is a quintessential pillar of a CMS. Being able to publish (scheduled or instantly) content anytime and anywhere (omnichannel), whether a single content object or a set, should never be a challenge. Are you still staying up until midnight to publish content for a campaign that starts overseas? We need to talk if that is affirmative.
Content Versioning
How is it possible that so many vendors still restrict their users regarding content versioning (number of versions, restricted retention windows, etc.) and the lack of basic previewing capabilities? Previewing content in the past and future and side-by-side comparison of content versions should be table stakes in 2023. Also, content versioning goes hand in hand with restoring previous versions of content, regardless of whether the CMS renders the content (headless).
Content Restrictions
We still see too many restrictions regarding subscription models for Content Management Systems. In an ever-growing digital world, nobody wants to be restricted in any way and pay for every overage. The pay-as-you-go model seems attractive initially but will get more suffocated as you are more successful with your platform. That’s weird, and it doesn’t have to be that way when running on dotCMS: Limitless Content Management.
Content Editor Experience
Apart from restrictions and developer dependencies, the content editor is often underwhelming. This is particularly true in older versions of monolithic vendors, but we also see this with customers replatforming from a pure headless CMS. A modern CMS offers many ways to make the editor experience joyful.
Scalability
Internet usage and adoption have seen tremendous growth in the past twenty years. This has ramifications for every enterprise business managing online applications, and with a CAGR of 28% of the internet traffic, scalability becomes more relevant. Proper caching, including Content Delivery Network and a proper underlying stack, is what dotCMS is offering. More on high performance here and just some numbers of a dotCMS customer running on two nodes and no CDN.
As I mentioned earlier, digital ambition requires ambitious software. If you face one or more of these pain points with your current CMS solution, 2023 might be a good year to resolve them.