alt Hacker NewsIn my experience, unless your non-dev CMS contributors are strictly filling in blanks with text (sometimes not even then), much of the work ends up delegated to the devs anyway. They are much better off working on a static build that deploys from CI pipelines in gitlab/github.
The benefits are massive ranging from better versioning, free choice of any tools under the sun, strict access control far away from people who don't even understand text encoding, clean CDN deployments, complete elimination of clunky SSR and its footguns, more precise control of the web server configuration, etc.
It's very rare nowadays to see any web devs who don't know the "full stack" from bare Apache/Nginx up to React (or even writing the exact necessary modern plain HTML/CSS/JS). That's why I distinguished the devs who prefer a CMS as "that kind of web dev".
This shift happened in the mid-2010s and I don't know anyone who ever looked back unless they're stuck slow-maintaining something older from before that point in time.
Licensing a CMS now seems like a pointless middleman cost for a subpar product from a time before we had good web standards that were well understood and supported. Every CMS sales pitch seems to be aimed squarely at middle management fearmongering for the most trivial and basic stuff any web dev already knows how to do a lot more efficiently and reliably without a CMS. All devs I see now have experience with these standards using more modern tools at large scale and with the full SDLC and business requirements in mind for over a decade.
Replies
> It's very rare nowadays to see any web devs who don't know the "full stack" from bare Apache/Nginx up to React
citation needed. Pretty much every single React/JS front end dev I've dealt with, doesn't know, understand, or care about the web server aspect itself "Not my problem".
> much of the work ends up delegated to the devs anyway
For many implementations though, requiring a dev to make the changes is the failure state.
I love static builds and use them all the time when they're the right fit for the project, but in many cases they are not. I'm also finding that I'm starting to lean towards a CMS more even when it's "just me", but I have a team of agents. i.e. I want the ability to have a voice conversation with a dot / grok bot / etc. and have it update content without it having the ability to do dev type things.