Preston So: The Case for a Universal CMS – Episode 197

Content Strategy Insights

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Preston So The CMS landscape has evolved a lot over the past couple of decades. Recently, headless CMSs and decoupled content architectures have appeared to address the need for omnichannel content experiences. While their separation of the management of content from its presentation offers many benefits, these systems have left many users dissatisfied and disillusioned. Preston So argues that the solution to this situation is universal CMS. We talked about: the unique place in the software world that CMSs occupy how the need for cross-functional collaboration in a CMS drives the need for something like a universal CMS how the focus of headless CMSs on the developer experience has affected the end-to-end experience in content architectures his thoughts on the need for "a single UI to rule them all" the trends that have driven the move to decoupled architectures and headless CMSs the disconnect he sees between the need to address omnichannel content delivery and the expectations of content authors and editors the need in decoupled architectures for some level of "recoupling" of functionality so that "people understand what they're doing" the challenges of managing content for omnichannel delivery the need to orchestrate content activities across functional teams the resistance in the market to complex architectures that require a variety of solutions the importance of constraining the number of mental models that people using CMSs have to hold in their heads the Universal CMS Summit that his company is hosting August 5 in Montreal Preston's bio Preston So (he/they) is a product executive with over 25 years in software, 17 years in content technologies, and 9 years leading product, design, engineering, and developer relations functions at organizations such as Oracle, Acquia, dotCMS, Time Inc., and Gatsby. He is Vice President, Product at dotCMS and the author of Immersive Content and Usability (A Book Apart, 2023), Gatsby: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly, 2021), Voice Content and Usability (A Book Apart, 2021), and Decoupled Drupal in Practice (Apress, 2018). Named “the smartest guy in the field” by Content Strategy for Mobile author Karen McGrane in 2024 and “probably the smartest person working in this industry right now” by Web Content Management author Deane Barker in 2020, Preston is a globally recognized authority on the intersections of content, design, and code. He is an editor at A List Apart and former top-read columnist at CMSWire. Preston is a frequent presenter with 17 years of speaking engagements spanning over 50 conferences, including SXSW Interactive (2017, 2017 encore, 2018) and An Event Apart (2020–22) and keynotes in three languages. He is based in New York City, where he can often be found immersing himself in languages that are endangered or underserved. Connect with Preston online Preston.So LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/XZXBBrWtFFg Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 197. The tech world is in constant flux. And content management technology is no exception. Over the past decade or so, we've seen the arrival of headless CMSs and the introduction of decoupled content architectures. While that decoupling appeals to developers and offers new content-delivery opportunities, its abstractness and complexity have left many CMS users disillusioned and disoriented. Preston So argues that the solution to this situation is a universal CMS. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 197 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome back to the show Preston So. Preston's my first three-time guest. And pro-tip for anybody trying to do that, just write a bunch of books and do interesting things and you also can be on three times. Preston is currently the VP of Product at dotCMS, a CMS company. Welcome, Preston. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Preston: Hey, Larry. It's a real pleasure to be back here at the Content Strategy Insights podcast for the third time, and thanks for having me back. It's a real pleasure. Preston: I'm Preston So. I've been in the content management space for about 17 years, software for about 25 years as well. And over the last 10 years, I've been really focusing on the product angle of content management. I work as VP of Product at dotCMS, but you might also know me as the author of several books. I've written the books on decoupled Drupal or headless Drupal and Gatsby JS, and I've also written the books that are the authoritative guides to voice content strategy and immersive content strategy. It's nice to be back, Larry. Larry: Yeah, it's great to have you. And your latest, you're just obviously clearly full of ideas and thoughts about the industry. And I think one of the latest ideas is this notion of the universal CMS, which is a term that you coined to address a problem that a lot of people are coming at it and from different directions. But I'd love to talk a little bit about that, but maybe dive in first to why that's necessary. Where are we at in the evolution of CMS technology and why is something like a universal CMS needed now? Preston: Absolutely, and I'll start off with a quick summary of what I've been noticing and also the definitions of universal CMS, and I'll hop into a couple of stories and anecdotes here. Preston: Universal CMS is really catching on quite a bit in the CMS industry. It's a term that really is about how the CMS will evolve in the future. I believe very strongly and we believe at dotCMS, and a lot of other folks across the CMS world also believe this, that we're headed towards a very new generation of content management, and it's what I call universal CMS. What I mean by that is that what we've seen over the course of the last five to 10 years is a CMS market that has evolved to become a little bit less viable and attractive for those who want to do things collaboratively in the CMS. Preston: The content management system occupies a very unique ecological niche in the world of software in that it's a very unique hub of collaboration between very different personas and very different groups of people in the back office that need to do very, very different things. Somebody who might be looking at compliance, for example, or somebody who might be looking at HIPAA compliance if you're in the healthcare world or in the health insurance world or in the pharmaceutical world might only hop into CMS once in a blue moon, but they still need to be able to do a lot of the same things that people that are on content teams and content practitioners do on a daily basis. Preston: The universal CMS is very interesting because of the fact that it really focuses on the end-to-end value stream that CMS has provided in their earliest generation in the static web CMS era, those legacy tools like Interwoven or Expression Engine or Movable Type, which really were focused on allowing for both developers and content editors and content authors to be able to work together within the same exact environment and using the same tools and meeting in the middle, so to speak, when it came to the CMS. Preston: I've heard from a lot of folks over the last few weeks in the last few months and the last few years, of course, that the current approaches that we're seeing on the market are simply not viable. Obviously, over the course of the past 10 to 15 years, you've seen headless CMSs and composable CMSs really begin to revolutionize the way that developers and the way that architectures consume content, but you're also now seeing on the hybrid headless or traditional side of things in the CMS market a shift away from just focusing on that content practitioner's experience and moving more towards doing things more niftily, so to speak, with headless architectures and so on, so forth. Preston: But the problem is that these CMSs, especially in the headless and composable area of the market, have really focused on developers at the expense of content practitioners, marketers, compliance auditors, legal counsel, all the people that have to hop in the CMS to preview content across a variety of different assets and experiences. What they've done is they've focused quite a bit on architectural purism on a really clean separation of concerns, architecturally speaking, but they haven't really resolved, so to speak, some of the restoration of key features and functionality that characterize that static web era for content authors, content editors, and everyone who works with content but not with code. Preston: By the same token, what you're seeing now is in the hybrid headless CMSs, you're seeing a lot of growth towards building more headless ecosystems, more developer-friendly ecosystems, more APIs. These are ways for people to actually extract content out of CMSs and build them into all the presentation layers they want to build, all their delivery channels. So the universal CMS is really about, well, how can we restore that end-to-end value stream, that grand compromise that really characterize that earliest generation of the CMS? Preston: Which is yes, the only experience that we had to serve content to was a single website, but now we have so many. We have different frameworks that are coming out every single week. We have Astro for example. We have Svelte for example that came out in the last few years. We also have other channels now that we have to serve, especially web-renderable channels. These are channels that are not necessarily on the webpage or on the web at all, but might still need to be previewed for compliance reasons or for preview reasons that editorial teams often have. But this is content that's destined towards a very different source.

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