Looking for a new CMS can feel like trying to find books on another shelf while your existing shelf is RIGHT THERE. (Paul Schafer/Unsplash)
In 2018, I spent months researching content management systems. Here’s what I learned.
In 2018, it was clear that the CMS I had been using to manage Tedium, Ghost, was a bit of a dead end for me. It was not them, to be clear. It was me.
I had more complex needs for my content, and I felt I was not in a position to wait for my platform to catch up to those. I was essentially MacGyvering a newsletter out of a public Ghost instance that delivered web-based content, and a local Ghost instance that just spat out newsletter code. It barely worked, and the worst part was that Ghost was moving away from Showdown, the Markdown engine I built my tooling around. I was between a rock and a hard place. And so, I needed a new CMS.
To be clear, this was my fault, not Ghost’s. I made presumptions about Ghost’s roadmap that didn’t play out, and I chose the platform because it was trending, not because it actually fit my needs. And that put me in a precarious spot. (There’s a lesson for your own CMS strategies: Understand the roadmap.)
But the good news was, I could fix it.
A good content management system should just let your old posts sit on a shelf so you don’t have to think about them. (Franz Schekolin/Unsplash)
I spent months doing research, spinning up all sorts of local instances on my Hackintosh. I tried static site generators like Hugo, at a time when they were all the rage. My research led me to highly obscure CMS platforms like Kirby and OctoberCMS. Flat-file platforms, where everything was just a Markdown file in a folder, struck my fancy for a while. I even considered (and quickly dismissed) the possibility of moving my newsletter to a hosted platform.
(However, as I built the site in a contrarian spirit and wanted to avoid security issues, I did not try WordPress.)
Eventually, I made my decision, and on January 1, 2019, I relaunched my site on Craft CMS, which got me out of my rock-and-hard-place CMS predicament. Yeah, I know. PHP. Even I was shocked that I went with PHP.
Having gone through this, I learned some essential things along the way that helped me determine the option that made sense for me. Given that presumably hundreds or thousands of folks are having to make this decision themselves, here’s what I can suggest:
- Go into the process with a list of desired features. I had a few things like this. First off, it was essential that I have something I could use to edit in Markdown that could handle shortcodes, so I didn’t have to edit visually. I also wanted to streamline my email production, and wanted to generate MJML templates. I also needed full control over formatting and content structure. Finally, my CMS needed good documentation and a strong enough ecosystem that I wouldn’t feel stranded if something went wrong. Your calculus will be different, but you should know your red lines.
- Despite outward appearances, PHP isn’t a bad word. The language is often seen as extremely out of date in today’s environment, an uncool language compared to Go or Rust, and less flexible than JavaScript. But when the goal is to deliver content, you want consistency and a big community. PHP has that in spades. At the time I was looking, not many modern tech stacks had that. That maturity means something when it comes to structuring content.
- The most important thing is the ecosystem. Reading Product Hunt or Hacker News, it can be easy to fall into the trap of wanting to pick the cool new thing just because it’s cool and new. But the truth is, if a cool CMS doesn’t have people hacking on it, you may have nobody to turn to for help. While APIs and tools like Zapier can cover the gaps, that is not a guarantee.
- Understand what you’re signing up for. There are numerous questions to ask yourself when you move to a CMS. Do you need to teach other people how to use this tool? (Will they be able to figure it out?) Are you willing to pay for something, or does it need to be open-source? What’s the development experience like? And do you think you can live with it for a while? The answers won’t initially be clear.
- When you’ve decided on something, you have to stick with it. It doesn’t matter whether you like a feature in another CMS. Moving content platforms is difficult, and when you move from something, odds are you won’t be making the move again for at least three years, if not longer.
There are many ways to host content management systems. The WordPress/WP Engine battle is rooted in the fact that many companies want managed hosting, where the technical details are decided for you. And at first, after my switch to Craft CMS, I actually used something like that, from a company called Fortrabbit.
But I figured out that I’m adept enough to maintain my own servers, so that’s what I do now, using the lightweight server management tool Cleavr and hosting on Hetzner. (I am thinking about moving to their ARM servers, which I’ve tested with success, by the way.)
Not everyone needs the same kind of content organization system. (Chris Lawton/Unsplash)
Five CMS platforms for five different types of people
Despite what the statistics might suggest about WordPress’ overall prowess, no one CMS is right for everyone.
You may be running a website with literally thousands of pages and hundreds of stakeholders. You may just be running something for yourself in a shoebox. It is sheer chance that, for years, the same tool looked like the best choice for most publishers.
Rather than list every CMS under the sun, I want to offer a selection of platforms that, in most cases, I’ve experimented with in-depth. (If you want a quick-glance thing, this table built by Jason Lawton does the trick.) Each has different elements that make them great choices for different classes of creators. The underlying technology may differ sharply (though I promise, no Perl). But, depending on who you are, you may find a drama-free approach in these options.
Anyway, take a look. If your fave isn’t here, it’s not personal:
The Agency Environment
The plugin interface of Craft CMS. The company has a number of developers supporting the Craft ecosystem, many of whom specialize in it.
Craft CMS, when you want to pore over every detail of your website
I believe I first heard about Craft CMS from a dude named Jeff Greco, someone I met via the Something Awful forums, who helped me develop an early website in 2004. He built a custom CMS backend for an online magazine at my school, while I designed the front-end look. It was rudimentary, but it worked. (And shockingly, more than 20 years later, we’re still connected via social media. I’ve kept in better touch with him than many people I actually went to school with.)
So to hear it from him was enough to give it a look-see, and I realize why it was such a cool option. Long story short, it presumes you want to build your own content structure from top to bottom, to your exact needs. This interface allows me to lay out my website and generate the emails for my newsletter. It does everything I need it to do.
That flexibility, however, is likely to leave out people who just want to pick a theme and write. Craft doesn’t really have themes. Instead, it presumes you’ll build a content architecture, then build a template system to match that architecture.
But the thing is, if you’re running a marketing agency or web design shop, you don’t want a theme anyway; you’re trying to build content from the ground up to meet your needs. As a result, its model is most effective for large agencies—every new site, if used by more than one person, requires a paid license. (No, it’s not open-source, but source-available, which is probably the biggest rub against it.)
Despite the differences in philosophy to WordPress, it is similar to WordPress in many key ways. It has a robust plugin ecosystem, and a strong developer community. If you want a CMS, you want both of those things, so if you get lost, you’re not screwed.
I can’t recommend enough.
» Alternatives to consider: Statamic, Kirby, Drupal
The Independent Creator
The backend of Ghost looks super-elegant—probably helped by the lack of plugins to mess it up!
Ghost, when you just want to publish a newsletter with a paywall
Ghost is probably the second-best-known self-hosted blogging platform these days among regular people, in part because of its wide use in the newsletter space. The service counts 404 Media, Hell World, The Browser, Tangle, and Platformer among its big names.
It has come a long way. I originally used it for Tedium in 2015, when it wasn’t focused on paid membership sites. I had to hack my own shortcodes into it, and I was waiting on plugins to be announced so I could use a less hacked-up approach to the backend. Eventually, it became clear that plugins weren’t coming, and I decided to switch platforms, realizing that I needed a different platform for my personal ambitions. I do not begrudge them their success, however, and I still recommend the platform frequently.
But I do think you have to accept that you’re working in a blogging system that expects a specific shape and leans on external integrations over internal plugins. If you’re moving from WordPress, that can feel like a dramatic change. I wanted more than that, so I looked elsewhere.
That said, if you play by Ghost’s rules, you will find it a great system.
» Alternatives to consider: WriteFreely, PostHaven, Buttondown
The Ambitious Dev Shop
This is a surprisingly elegant front-end, given how much Directus can do.
Directus, for people who want a CMS for their website … and their entire intranet
At some point, you’re likely to find a class of content management systems that, when broken down, are glorified database front-ends that you can technically build anything within. They are headless CMSes, first and foremost.
And because they are databases at heart, you can build anything with them—from traditional content sites, to front-facing apps, to internal HR systems. “WordPress clone” is only part of the sales pitch.
Most of these systems, like Contentful or Storyblok, are built around a pure SaaS model. Directus, however, is not. The platform, which has a decade-long legacy, has a model I would consider friendly to open-source ideals, while not having a traditional GPL license. It uses the Business Source License, which requires you to pay if your company makes $5 million or more per year, but is otherwise free for hobbyist or small business uses. That means, for most hobbyists or small businesses, you can self-host Directus to your heart’s content. (Plus, if you’re willing to wait, Directus eventually reverts its old versions to the GPL, a nice compromise.)
Directus does cool videos where it shows off its developers building things with the toolset—in this case, a social network.
Despite all this, Directus is a breeze to use in a backend environment. It has a friendly, highly customizable content interface, and it has a large, mature enough community that you will likely find a lot to work with. Plus, its YouTube channel is excellent, making it great for learning at your own pace.
Also, Directus is not opposed to making big changes for the good of the project. A few years ago, the company decided to push the whole thing from PHP to Node.js, quite an undertaking. The upside: With that change in the past, you can benefit from the modernization if that’s your bag.
The one thing about these tools is that because they’re just fancy backends, you still need to code your front-end logic, which will require getting comfortable with a static site generator or programming framework like React. But if you’re comfortable with that, it could allow you maximum flexibility in your future endeavors.
I have aspirations to build something in Directus someday, because I feel like the overhead would be endless.
Alternatives to consider: Strapi, Payload CMS, Laravel
The Lazy Switcher
Look familiar? That’s kind of the idea.
ClassicPress, for people who liked WordPress back in the day and never want it to change
Recently, I talked to a friend who hates what’s happening to the WordPress community, but is so invested in it that he’s too tired to want to move.
Is there an option for people like him? Yes. That option is ClassicPress. Built about half a decade ago in direct response to a change in editor design that many developers felt was forced upon them, ClassicPress is essentially an up-to-date version of the WordPress interface without the addition of Gutenberg. Gutenberg is a more visual editing experience that the WordPress community did not digest super-easily, to the point where there are more than 10 million installs of the Classic Editor, which essentially reverts WordPress to the pre-Gutenberg days.
ClassicPress is essentially a harder-line version of that. One might argue that while Gutenberg was difficult to digest, the community eventually made peace with it. That means the debate that led to ClassicPress is water under the bridge. But on the other hand, if you want to keep your decade-old site running, and you don’t want to deal with the extra BS of the WordPress community, it’s easy to see why ClassicPress might look like an attractive off-ramp.
Alternatives to consider: Moving your content to a static site, just waiting it out
The Programming-Curious Minimalist
Eleventy doesn’t really have a screenshot of its web interface because it’s a command-line tool, so here’s a shot of its current website.
Eleventy, the easy way to lean into static sites
Maybe you’re at the point with your WordPress journey where you’re done with the traditional interface. Maybe you just want to simplify.
Static site generators, a trend that kicked into overdrive about 15 years ago with the creation of the Ruby-based Jekyll, have maintained an ongoing interest in technical circles, in part because they’re seen as a back-to-basics approach to website creation. Static site generators have long been popular with programmers—building a Jekyll blog on GitHub has long been a developer rite of passage. But static-site generator technology has continued to improve greatly, to the point where it is arguably easier to use now than ever.
That’s where Eleventy comes into play. First built in 2017 by Zach Leatherman, it is intended to spit out a fully-static site, while being highly flexible and compatible. While still technical, it is relatively beginner-friendly for a command-line tool. As a result, Eleventy (also known as 11ty) has a pretty big user base. And many of those users have written blog posts about their experiences moving from WordPress to Eleventy, so there are lots of scripts you can pull from. (I bet, if you wanted to, ChatGPT could also help.)
Plus, you don’t actually need to pay for hosting to use it. You can generally run an Eleventy install on Netlify or Glitch without a monthly bill for basic services.
If you’re a weekend warrior who wants your blog to teach you something about coding, Eleventy may be the way to go.
Alternatives to consider: Jekyll, Hugo, Astro
Log in
