We started building CMSes before the days of Wordpress, and we’ve built new CMS every five years or so since. In 2020, hunkered in my covid quarters, I wanted to devise the next version that had a hosted version, a self-hosted, more customizable version, and an open source version.
Kentico’s Petr Palas wrote a treatise in 2017 on why we shouldn’t build a new CMS. His essay basically considers custom CMSes a way to lock in clients, and suggests cloud-first headless CMSes were the future. I, as well, have built multiple versions of custom CMSes, but I see it quite the opposite – even 8 years later, now is exactly the time to create a new CMS.
In this talk I’m going to show the process, roadmap, dangers and successes of creating a content management system from the ground up. I’m going to talk through each of the parts, including errors and notification systems, issues and help systems, user and permissions systems, etc. I’m going to cover the many “required” layers of development that we just didn’t need that saved us thousands of hours and acquired a fraction of the technical debt.