The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

reconnecting

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

btown

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.

librasteve

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

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?

fg137

> 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?

simonw

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.

pjmlp

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

BubbleRings

> 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

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.

tappio

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.

torm

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

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

lizardking

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

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

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.

donohoe

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.

jillesvangurp

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

My god this title cliche is annoying

snowwrestler

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

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.