Where are all the CMS applications going?

I’ve been writing something here 3 times a week for a few years now. No one will ever mistake me for a professional writer, but I’ve enjoyed it immensely, even as various circumstances have made many of my posts a bit, well, brief this past year.

One truth to all of this is I couldn’t do this if this site was still on Hugo.

I’m constantly linking between posts, updating content, etc and Hugo just wasn’t made for that.

WordPress, for all of its faults, really is the perfect environment for me to just write. I can turn on “distraction free mode” and just see where the words take me. There’s no complex setup in a text editor, no commits and no build steps to inevitably fail. There’s a lot to be said for that.

I miss the days of 10-15 years ago when there was still an interest in CMS applications for, well, managing content and doing so efficiently. Today everything is either a flat-file processor like Hugo or, as WordPress is trying so very hard to become, a design management system. In both cases the actual management of content has become, at best, an after-thought or even side effect of some other niche use.

I don’t know where WordPress will be in the next 10-15 years but I really do hope, if it continues on its current trajectory, that there will emerge a new system as capable as WordPress was but that still cares about the data of content and managing that easily.

Yes, today I’ve made my peace with WordPress for this site. That said, I know it isn’t the best platform for many sites these days and I yearn to get back to that magical period of 10-15 years ago when the data in application like WordPress really was the most important focus.