T3CON24 Recap - The Future of Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS)

Boye started his talk by walking through what’s currently working well within the open source CMS ecosystem. He shared the above quotation from Rebecca Ackermann’s 2023 article “The future of open source is still very much in flux”, and pointed to recent surges in funding as signs of the health of the open source community. 

However, there are also challenges. Boye shared the central thesis of Strategy and the Fat Smoker by David Maister— that we often know what we need to change and how to improve, such as quitting smoking and exercising in the book’s example, but execution remains difficult. “That’s what is going on with CMSs — it’s easy to come up with a strategy, but it's really hard to do the execution part,” Boye shared. “I think we can only be successful if there's enough momentum, enough appetite for change. Many other communities are facing this problem, where the most successful agencies are run by people who are a little bit older than me. Are they still hungry to adapt, to imagine new visions and big changes? That's what it will take, and I think those are the agencies that will be successful, and those are the CMSs that will be successful.”

What are the key challenges that open source CMSs need to adapt to? Boye shared four key areas from a preview of a report due for release in early 2025: 

• Content without clicks: the new rules of discovery: The continued significance of social media and the rise of AI-assisted search means more content discovery is happening off-site than ever before— and content platforms need to adjust accordingly. 
• AI’s intern era: beyond the automation fantasy: Riffing on the Marc Andreessen quote “Software is eating the world”, many now claim “AI is eating the software”. Boye concurred that the recent leaps in generative AI is already shifting how software is developed and maintained, and will continue to do so. 
• The great headless hangover: recovering from developer dependencies:Headless CMSs, such as TYPO3, are widely being touted as a smart method of “future-proofing” content management. 
• The edge advantage: faster, safer, smarter experiences: Edge computing— a paradigm for data management which optimizes for data being processed closer in the network to the point of generation— is gaining momentum, and is predicted to become an increasingly popular paradigm in the current years.

Undoubtedly one of the most headline-grabbing developments in the open source CMS space of late is the feud between Wordpress’ “benevolent dictator for life” Matt Mullenweg, and the Wordpress hosting service WPEngine. “It’s been a wake up call to many, both in the WordPress community and outside, to pay more attention to governance,” Boye shared. “Perhaps it’s a little bit like democracy — if you don’t play an active role in it, it won’t go in the direction you want it to.” 

In less controversial news, Boye also highlighted the Drupal Starshot initiative, and the impending release of Drupal CMS. “I really love the name,” Boye commented. “I think that's a testament to saying that while open source CMS is changing, we are kind of settling down to naming and branding our products ‘CMS’.” 

On the commercial side of CMS, Boye addressed what he referred to as “the elephant in the room”: Adobe Experience Manager’s capability to publish content directly from SharePoint, Microsoft Word, and Google Docs. He predicts this will lead to more companies expecting their CMSs to function less like “content repositories”, and to become an organic extension of their content creation workflows. 

Boye also highlighted Kentico Xperience: a brand new CMS product released by an 18-year-old CMS company. Additionally, he touched on Contentful’s recent purchase of Ninetailed, an AI personalization platform, and the increased importance of personalization in digital content experiences.

“Here's one that feels silly to me after 20 years,” Boye shared. “When you're building a new website for manufacturing, a university, or a government, why are we always starting at zero?” Many open source solutions market themselves as a toolbox, allowing teams to build whatever they want— and then agencies step in, offering to build an entirely custom solution from scratch. Many companies would benefit from having a “50% to 80%” customizable solution that they could build on top of. Boye highlighted the work of Terminalfour in this area: they specialize in higher education, offering a CMS with classes, courses and curricula built in. This drastically reduces time to market for companies. 

The best way to build accessible software is to build it in collaboration with special needs web users. Aside from the moral imperative to work towards a more accessible and inclusive web, Boye shared that in the W3C CMS selection process, Craft CMS won out over WordPress partially because of their built-in accessibility features. Not only is built-in accessibility beneficial for compliance, but many of the editors and site contributors are themselves disabled, and will push for working with tools that have adequately considered accessibility issues. The new European Accessibility Act will take effect in June 2025 — but Boye urged the audience to push forward with accessibility initiatives regardless of legislation. What’s legally mandated for accessibility is not the gold standard; it’s the bare minimum. 

Hundreds of thousands of WordPress sites get hacked each year. Bots crawl to discover which CMS websites are using, and then attack vulnerabilities specific to their system. “We need our sites to be reliable and trustworthy, and I think there's more work for us to do here,” Boye stressed. “It's not the sexiest of topics, but it's more important than it's ever been before.”

The digital industry has been flying under the radar when it comes to sustainability. “It’s an established idea that we need to reduce the number of international flights we take,” Boye shared. “The internet uses more carbon than the entire airline industry, but somehow avoids the bad press.” As digital experiences become more ubiquitous and more technologically complex, the carbon footprint of the internet continues to grow and grow. We need to be considering sustainability as a fundamental aspect of digital design and maintenance. Boye suggested using the website Ecograder as a jumping off point for considering more eco-friendly design. He also shared the hope that sustainability would become a competitive advantage for open source CMSs who really invest the time into making more sustainable products. 

Ultimately, open source CMSs need to change to survive, but many of the necessary changes aren’t new or unknown. Boye stressed the importance of having a communicable strategy and a strong vision for an organization’s future, praising TYPO3’s efforts in this area. What’s crucial, however, is not just identifying what needs to be done but following through. We already know people want a safer, more sustainable, more inclusive web — open source needs to harness this knowledge, respond to this demand, and build the web we already know we need. 

Did you enjoy this recap? If you would like to relive all the exciting moments from T3CON24, be sure to check our our recap of the entire conference! 

Official T3CON24 Recap