I Have a Dream of the CMS Future
My American dream
Fell apart at the seams.
You tell me what it means,
You tell me what it means.
- HEARTLAND
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest vision for The Future of Content Management Systems.
Fifteens years ago, two great Americans, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, created something. Ross Garber and Neil Webber’s product came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Content Management editors who had been seared in the flames of unmanageable sites. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their tedious static HTML updates.
But fifteens years later, the CMS world is still imperfect. Fifteen years later, thousands of vendors are still sadly crippled by a lack of standard patterns, terminology, tools and concerns. Fifteen years later, CMS vendors still live on a lonely islands of in the midst of a vast ocean of potential standards. Fifteen years later, there still isn’t anyone who has done it properly. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
I am not unmindful that some of you CMS vendors have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have code bases that are ten years old and will resist change at every turn. Some of you have lucrative clients locked in to long term contracts who will not be easily upgraded to new systems. Some of you have come from attempts to differentiate yourselves from your competitors that have left you battered by the storms of feature bloat and staggered by the winds of pricing wars. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.
Go back to Open Text, go back to Autonomy, go back to Microsoft, go back to SDL Tridion, Day, Alterian and Fatwire. Go back to the smaller commercial vendors and hordes of Open Source vendors, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of proprietory isolation.
As we Separate the Concerns and Embrace the Standards, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of standards, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as systems all use different names for the same thing. We can never be satisfied, as long as CMS vendors ignore their core features and focus on gimmicks for sales pitches. We cannot be satisfied when content migration from one system to another takes longer than building a house. We cannot be satisfied as long as as Content Management, Community, Analytics, eCommerce and more are moulded into a giant monolith instead of walking hand in hand like loosely coupled brothers.
I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the Content Management dream.
I have a dream that one day the vendors will rise up and live out the true meaning of interoperability: “We all need to work together to succeed, and those that don’t play will be left behind.”
I have a dream that one day all vendors will stop building exactly the same thing in slightly different ways, and that ridiculous templating languages will be replaced with the beauty of XSLT. And that repositories will not differentiate between data and metadata.
I have a dream that one day even the commercial vendors, who are often centres of innovation, will implement their systems using standard formats and will interoperate with open source tools. And let the best of these standard formats not start with a J and alienate more than half of the vendor community.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day log into every CMS system using their OpenID and avoid the perils of priopritary user databases.
I have a dream today.
Let logical, standard XML formats replace rigid, sparsely populated relational databases!
Let existing tools such as SVN or GIT release us from the limitations of badly implemented priopritary versioning systems!
But not only that; let these same versioning tools gives us virtualisation and deployment using branching and tagging!
Let authentication happen outside of the CMS. And let Workflow tools operate externally with any payload, not by adding an attribute to a content object.
Let freedom ring from every W3C validator and every WCAG recommendation. From every friendly URL and SEO ranking, let freedom ring.
Let freedom from vendor lock in ring from Austen, Texas to Stockholm, Sweden!
And when this happens, when we allow standards to pervade, when we let them ring from every commericial CMS and every Open Source CMS, from every XML format and every JCR specification and every CMIS binding and every new standard we so sorely need to produce, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s users, authors, developers, content migrators, administrators and system procurers, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the lucky stakeholder who moved to a new CMS quickly and easily, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
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For those that are wondering, you can blame Julian Wraith for this abomination. To find more about this:
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You had me up until I read “ridiculous templating languages will be replaced with the beauty of XSLT”. Then I realised this was a belated April Fool’s Joke!
I thought some people might not like that. But I am a huge XSLT fan. Still surprised it hasn’t taken off. Maybe it’s just ahead of its time.
Umbraco is making good use of XSLT when creating “macros”, it’s proven to be quite popular – especially among “scripting developers”! Google Search Appliance and Sharepoint are other examples where XSLT is deeply adopted, but I don’t think it has won over the majority of system developers yet!
+1 for XSLT it does what is required to transform content to markup very well.
If you run into problems, most likely an issue with your data capture or CMS implementation.
My post on the future of CMS is more about what we were talking about the other day than a direct response to Julian I guess.
Glad to see our drink got you off you ass! Love the cartoon you used. I do plan to write more detailed stuff too when I get a moment. Right now, it’s 1:00 in London and 20:00 in New York, so it’s time to head off for a few anti-jetlag beers.
I am too a fan of XSLT, in the ideal world. Sadly it’s much easier to just “do the work”. I believe this is why XSL hasn’t taken off. The barrier to entry is quite big (new “language”, data needs to be _structured_ in XML, loads, and loads to write to achieve even the simplest tasks, etc).
Still, this dream doesn’t sound too far from a certain system you built in the early 2000s.
Good post!
I still don’t understand why XSLT is perceived as difficult. Different, yes. Difficult. no. And if you’re talking about the system I think you’re talking about, it wasn’t close at all. Close on the XSLT front, but looking back it was way off target in many areas. That was a long long time ago, wasn’t it. The goold old days when services companies would still write their own CMS
I need to jump on this topic. XSLT can be tricky. We have used SXLT for content renderig for years, and we have mixed feelings. Many of our team loved it and many hated it. Most of the “i hate xslt” actually came from one of the following sources: inadequate knowledge of XSLT, putting business logic into XSLT, trying to template everything in XSLT even when a simpel for-each is more readable and making extremely large XSLT-s.
When we used short and simple XLST-s, averyone was satisfied. So I think the question is not wether XSLT is right or wrong, but can you Learn it or not. It is like driving. If people drive like morons, why blame cars? Blame morons.
Tom
“putting business logic into XSLT” sounds like people are trying to use one tool for everything. XSLT at the presentation layer is fine, but you need other tools elsewhere!
Nice post Jon. I emotionally agree with most of your points and also long for a better world of cms with ‘one’ standard, one generic templating language, one authentication procedure, one authorization mechanism, one content xml, one CVS system that integrates with all CMS, one interface to access, share and manage content residing on other integrated CMS, User roles that can shared across CMS and one governing body for standards.
The fact is “proprietary isolation” is also very much required, as the competition between vendors leads to more innovative ideas, more features and functionalities in CM system.
Standards are required for interoperability, but think they do not contribute much in the future of a CMS as a separate entity
Hmmm… can’t wait for the novel…
My tuppence worth: XSLT is fine as a batch data transformation tool, but I don;t think that it’s really expressive enough for interface building.
Nah, as long as there is money involved, we’ll see different standards. The aftermarket is where the real cash is.
“Let logical, standard XML formats replace rigid, sparsely populated relational databases!”
Have you seen Symphony?
Hi James. I like the look of your site, actually. I don’t know anything about Symphony CMS but anything that has XSLT in the strapline is worth a look.
It’s not too late to do the CMS Vendor Meme and tell us all more:
http://jonontech.com/2009/03/25/celebrity-cms-deathmatch-part-3/
And I have a dream that everyone who writes for work produces stuff that is focused, factual, and findable. Even the best CMS is no use when the content is unmanageable.
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