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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

My company does a lot of CMS work for clients. Everything from static site generators up to giant enterprise tools. One thing I've determined is that the giant enterprise tools are nearly worthless even for the enterprises they're designed to serve. They add giant layers of complexity to service features that look great in a demo and serve no business purpose. Then they become a technical ghetto full of proprietary plugin code that require product expertise and are inaccessible to the rest of the dev team. That and they cost $100K-$1MM and more for licenses. It's possible to implement them well, but only by applying the same kind of design principles you would to simpler systems. Even when I'm working with a client that doesn't blink at the price tag, I'm 100% onboard with headless or flat files.

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I'm reminded of the now-vanished JWZ post about "groupware". Enterprise software is nearly always awful in lots of ways that the purchaser insists on. They don't want a cheap, general solution that empowers users. They want an expensive, high-profile, highly customised solution that railroads users into workflows. Often it's less important what the specific railroad is, just that it can be imposed.

Proprietary plugin code serves the need of the purchaser to feel special by getting something customised for them. They can then pretend it's a secret sauce for their business, despite it actually impairing employee productivity compared to, say, stock Wordpress.

> I'm reminded of the now-vanished JWZ post about "groupware".

It’s not vanished; here it is: [redacted]/doc/groupware.html

Try this link instead :)

(JWZ has anti-HN measures on his site.)

https://web.archive.org/web/20050217051819/https://www.jwz.o...

You should delete that link. It looks like whoever owns that site left an, uh, easter egg, for HN visitors. A rather inappropriate one.

It seems that the moderators have silently edited my post to remove the link. I have “referer” headers restricted in my web browser, so I did not see the redirect.

It seems that the so-called “vanished” article would be more appropriately named the “disappeared” article.

It’s Jamie Zawinski’s site. And unfortunately he doesn’t like Hacker News.

Couldn't agree more.

It's really interesting to see a new generation of vertical specific, large scale CMSs emerge (like from publishing with Chorus from Vox[0] or Arc from the Washington Post[1]).

My problem with 'Enterprise CMSs' was always that they tried to sell one hammer for every single type of nail, and actually, use cases for content management are so varied (and often specific to verticals) that you buy a big generalist CMS and end up having to customise and mess about with it so much you're always left in the situation you described.

[0]: https://getchorus.voxmedia.com [1]: https://www.arcpublishing.com

I think the maturity model for CMS is something like flat file to headless to homemade. If you ever reach the point that you have enough scale of content to require a dedicated editorial team, it's probably worth investing in something very domain-specific and tailored to your organization. Could be based on an existing headless or flat file system.

Hey, since you know about this space, could I contact you to to learn some more about it? I'm developing a product that can act as a CMS but is more general and I think more powerful. If you can email me, I'm arthur@everdb.net

I was being pitched by a "Enterprise" CMS company. One of their selling points, listed several times in their collateral, was:

* No need to dig through dozens of plugins to find the one that actually works. Since "EnterPriseCMS" is .NET, you can just write your own!

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