How open source CMS needs to change to survive

By Janus Boye

In a crowded and confusing marketplace, buyers increasingly turn to their digital agencies for platform decisions, but will the winning agencies of tomorrow keep pushing open source CMS?

The marketplace is also moving quickly, innovation is happening at a breakneck pace and will open source CMS be able to keep up? In particular when it comes to AI and the need to create faster, safer, smarter digital experiences big investments and quick decisions are needed.

To make matters more bleak for the current open source CMS leaders, WordPress is currently struggling with trademark lawsuits and other messy stuff that’s threatening to implode the community, Drupal is reinventing itself with the release of Drupal CMS and what about good old TYPO3? Why should next gen digital leaders chose to work with any of these 20+ year old IT systems?

Change is necessary, and to be fair, already happening and it’s also not too late. I consider myself both a champion and good friend of open source and in my keynote at the TYPO3 Conference 2024 held recently in Düsseldorf, Germany, I delivered a call to action both for TYPO3 community and also for the broader open source CMS community to keep changing to survive.

Open source CMS needs to change

Kasper Skårhøj, TYPO3 project founder, at the initial Boye conference in Aarhus in 2005, sitting next to David Nelson-Gal; SVP Engineering; Interwove (on the left) and Lars Fløe Nielsen from Sitecore (to the right)

Let’s first look to the past: It is incredible to think back to 2000 when the first open source edition of TYPO3 saw the light of day. YouTube wasn't even released until 2005 when Kasper Skårhøj came to Aarhus and the very first Boye conference. It was a different time indeed, Amazon was still mostly a bookstore, iPhones arrived in 2007, and in 2009 I wrote two posts about TYPO3, one comparing it to a solid German car and another on how Aarhus University selected TYPO3. The higher education institution selected it due to the long term prospect for the CMS coupled with scalability and are still using it today, some 15 years later.

Fast-forward to the end of 2024 in a GenAI world that’s still being defined. Not that long ago, content management was still mostly about managing pages. Humans and search engine crawlers were the only consumers of content; CMSs took quite a bit of work to implement and a while to deliver value. Now, that’s all changing, with big impacts all around.

Zooming out from CMS, it’s clear that open source is actually well and thriving. Citing from The future of open source by Rebecca Ackermann, published in MIT Technology Review in August 2023:

“the free and open-source software movement is not only alive and well; it has become a keystone of the tech industry”

At this point in my keynote, I weaved in one of my favourite business books, Strategy and the Fat Smoker by David Maister. A key point in the book is on earning and deserving the key relationships that will get you to where you want to go. Clearly, open source has influential friends, but looking around the room, not just in Düsseldorf, but also in the broader open source community, these friends are not getting any younger. And going with the memorable title of the book: Is the community ready to change - it’s not enough if you simply say that you want to eat healthy, exercise more and stop smoking. It’s all about the strategy execution.

In the same article on the future of open source by Rebecca Ackermann, there’s also this quote on the state of open source:

“The future of open source is still very much in flux. Free and open software have transformed the tech industry. But we still have a lot to work out to make them healthy, equitable enterprises”

So, yes, whether you like it or not, open source needs to change.

Open source CMS is changing

It’s been another eventful year for CMS. While CMS pundits might cheekily remark that some discussions remain the same for over two decades there’s actually change all around.

If we start with the end in mind, there’s the digital experiences that are delivered to customers. There’s new rules for content discovery or in other words: Something is happening with search. GenAI is also having a big impact and innovative startups like our members ai12z, now integrate AI-powered chatbots and search on websites. And then there’s the never ending need for faster, more inclusive, safer and smarter experiences, where much is happening right now.

Looking at the actual CMS, there’s also AI inside. We’ve already seen cute demos for a few years with ChatGPT or similar making texts longer, shorter or funnier, but GenAI is obviously more than that. It’s a big change for every user of the CMS and we are still only beginning to see the real impact. I recently met with Swiss entrepreneur Alain Veuve and he built on the famous Marc Andreessen quote from 2011 “Software is eating the world” and Alain took it to the next level by saying “AI will eat the software.“ He may just be right.

Finally with a broad look to the CMS marketplace with a look to the developer side, there’s what some could call a headless hangover. Developer dependencies in some organisations, where the pendulum perhaps swung a bit too far away from empowering marketing to do their digital work.

If we then look briefly at the open source CMS landscape. There’s the first-ever beta of Drupal CMS, which was just released and expected out in general availability on January 15, 2025. A big move towards non technical users for the popular open source platform, but also much change for the entire eco-system. And I’ll just be honest for a moment and say I really like their new product name. It’s a CMS and that’s what they call it, and not a buzzword like DXP.

Looking at the most popular open source CMS, WordPress, I won’t go far into the issue that started as trademark issue between a large hosting provider and the original creator of WordPress, but I’ll refer to these two posts for more background:

To the broader community, this big issue in the WordPress community, has been both a reminder of how widely used WordPress is, but also an eye opener in terms of the importance of proper governance in open source projects. The question is: How big of an impact will this have for WordPress? At the moment, it certainly seems to scare off both customers and talented developers considering engaging with the community.

Finally, I’ll just add that commercial CMS is actually changing as well. Adobe, who’s a clear market leader with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), has done much reinventing CMS with their Edge Delivery Services and Project Helix/Franklin. For more on this, Tom Cranstoun, widely known as The AEM Guy, wrote this helpful piece earlier this year: Introducing: The Universal Editor for Adobe Experience Manager. Besides Adobe, I’ll also add the big change with Kentico going SaaS with a new product (Xperience by Kentico), and headless champion Contentful buying Ninetailed to add AI-driven personalisation.

What the market really needs

While some analysts have talked about marketplace consolidation for over two decades, we’ve actually seen the opposite. A seemingly never ending continuous arrival of new CMS products on the scene. This might not really be what the market needs, but it’s a clear sign that the market is calling for better solutions to their problems.

The call for vertical or industry-specific solutions seems to be getting louder and louder. Irish-based Terminalfour used to be yet another general purpose CMS, but long ago decided to focus on creating a tailored package for higher education. This solves the urgent problem of reducing the time-to-market or time-to-value for CMS implementations. For a very long time, it’s been a market where vendors have almost proudly sold an empty toolbox (e.g. the Sitecore approach), which does make agencies happy and does offer flexibility for customers, but it means that implementations take a while.

The booth for the TYPO3-based Government Site Builder version 11 was quite popular at the TYPO3 conference 2024

In the TYPO3 space, the Government Site Builder (GSB) is another such example of a vertical solution specifially built to reduce implementation time and risk. There was a GSB booth at the TYPO3 conference, which was quite popular throughout the event.

Thinking about market needs and moving on from vertical solutions, the bigger problem is this constant reinventing the wheel. In this industry, a recent example has been all those headless CMS vendors now engineering their own content delivery option rather than settling on some industry standard. My previous favourite example was workflow, which all vendors seemed to insist on building on their own. I’m careful predicting the future, but it seems clear that we could make more progress if we didn’t spent engineering resources solving the same problem over and over again.

I also think of reinventing the wheel, when it comes to industry terminology. Seemingly every vendor has a different term for the same thing and that’s not what the market needs more of. My advice to vendors is to look for differentiation in what their actions, and not just in the talk. More on this later.

“Do you design for people with disabilities? Or together with them?”
As seen on a poster from incluthon.com at the TYPO3 Conference

There’s also the need for a more inclusive Web. Legislation is helping us here with the threat of fines for those large companies not meeting the European Accessibility Act. Still, we have a long way to go and I was happy to see some focus on building a better Web, also for those with disabilities, at the TYPO3 conference. Specifically for CMS, we still need accessible interfaces for the editors and it’s already been 4 years since the W3C chose against WordPress and other formidable contestants due to the lack of accessibility. For more on this, see What can we learn from the W3C CMS selection process.

The marketplace also really needs a safer Web, and the CMS has a role to play here. This goes in terms of security, where in particular WordPress still struggles with the eternal question: Is WordPress secure? My brief answer is yes, but customers are increasingly looking at security requirements, so additional scrutiny in this area is to be expected. When it comes to a safer Web, it’s also about reducing unnessary tracking, helping me as a consumer that I can trust the content I’m reading and finally avoiding those unethical and shadowy deceptive designs.

As a final area where the market is calling for better solutions, I focused on the need for sustainable digital leadership. A topic we’ve covered on many past members’ calls (start here: Do’s and Don’ts of Sustainable Systems Design) and the time has come for a more sustainable Web. With content management systems powering so many large, complex and global websites, vendors has a huge role to play in reducing carbon emissions from those digital properties.

Tell me how

It seems a low hanging fruit for open source CMS projects to align around industry terminology. As I said on the slide: Speak the language. Don’t make your own. Still, talk at the conference was about those so-called TYPO3’isms that clearly were familiar to most in the room, like ‘speaking URL’s, but doesn’t make much sense to outsiders. Back in October 2023, Canadian commercial CMS vendor Agility led the way, when they announced terminology updates to align with industry standards. Also there’s this issue from 2023 on the Drupal site: Locate drupalisms that might create confusion among users, so perhaps work is being done, slowly, but truly. As always: Recognising the problem is the first step towards solving it.

With everything happening at WordPress right now, a renewed focus on open source governance seems timely. My reminder here is that open source is not a spectator sport — the community relies on you to vote and participate. Sharing is caring, in particular when it comes to open source.

Then there’s the money. You can’t make a very big impact without it and some open source projects in this space have been almost shy of charging for services, membership and or training. Consider how the leading open source CMS’s have been around for over two decades, while in the course of not much more than a decade, Berlin-based Contentful have risen from 0 to surpassing $200m ARR and counting 10,000+ sites. In other words, customers are willing to spend good money to solve their business problems with a CMS.

A big part of the ‘how’, is also a clear product strategy. Drupal seems to be chasing a clear vision for Drupal CMS, but what about the others? Customers expect more than a product strategy on a document, they are looking for clear action that the strategy is being executed. If in doubt, read the book by David Maister that I mentioned earlier.

Agencies or those partners of the open source CMS, are also a big part of how open source CMS needs to change to survive. Existing agencies come with their valuable experience and customer base, while I do think that it will be the new agencies, those that actively select to go with an open source CMS, that will be the real winning formula for the future. Open source projects needs to keep asking themselves: Why would a digital agency of any size, anywhere in the world, bet their business on us? There’s also an opportunity for existing gold partners, or whatever the designation might be, to lead the way and show how they both give back to the community and grow their business.

Lastly, we need to apply open-source principles to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Or in the words of Michael Brennan, senior program officer at the Ford Foundation, from the MIT Technology Review article on The future of open source:

“We need designers, ethnographers, social and cultural experts. We need everyone to be playing a role in open source”

Perhaps at future open source conferences and meetups, we’ll also see more diversity in terms of who’s on stage and who’s actively impacting the community? I’m inclined to think that would be a good thing.

As a bonus: My closing advice to the TYPO3 community was to study the CMS books that are out there. Read Deane Barker’s books, read from the many other good authors who have published books on CMS topics like Ann Rockley, Carrie Hane and Kristina Halvorson. Take it to the level and make a book club — if we as a community don’t read and study the CMS books, who will?

Learn more about open source CMS

The conversation naturally continues in 2025 at our conferences and groups. Coming up first is CMS Kickoff 25 held in St. Pete, Florida on January 14 - 15, where you can also meet TYPO3, several enterprise WordPress agencies and others.

Coming up in 2025, are also local CMS Experts meetings around North America and Europe and we do continue our ambitious and curious learning program, also with regular members calls. We actually started 2024 with a call on Free and open-source software in 2024 - a gentle reminder.

Finally, you can also lean forward and study the graphical recording below from my keynote which was producted by Anja von Klitzing.