Top Five Articles From 2024

By Janus Boye

Once again the big stories this year covered AI (surprise!), but also articles on designing sustainable systems and digital equity made it to the top 5 alongside a piece on universal CMS.

It’s that time of year, where we look back at another year of learning and networking. We really like to have a good conversation and meet in person, but sharing openly as much as possible is also an important part of what we do. Sharing is caring!

Keeping with tradition, here are the five posts, which seemed to resonate the most based on readership and engagement numbers.

It’s clearly unfair to select just five out of 35 blog posts, but here you go in alphabetical order:

#1: A tech update at the beginning of the Gen AI DIY-era

Seb Barre works Digital Platform Product Lead at TELUS in Toronto and is among our speakers at the CMS Kickoff 25 conference in St. Pete in January

The hype around that thing called AI can be deafening and it’s quite overwhelming to try to stay on top of all the seemingly relevant AI developments.

To help us untangle what’s really happening and the impact it is having, we invited digital platform product lead Seb Barre from TELUS in Toronto to walk us through how he sees the big picture and notable changes.

Seb made the interesting point that we are entering a new do-it-yourself era for generative AI. While the first wave (2023) was dominated by large, proprietary offerings, including OpenAI, today other options have arrived on the scene, which allows organisations to seize new use cases and also approach it with more flexibility and lower costs attached.

As expected, it became a packed conversation on large language models, action models, new devices, privacy, how search is failing us, open source and much more. Seb shared plenty of interesting tools and also shared how to get your organisation to embrace AI.

Read the full post: A tech update at the beginning of the Gen AI DIY-era

#2: Do’s and Don’ts of Sustainable Systems Design

Andy Eva-Dale is Technical Director at Tangent and also an Umbraco MVP and Headless + Sustainability Community Team member.

We all have a responsibility to make sure we are implementing green, responsible systems of the future. 

In what became a popular post, Andy Eva-Dale from UK-based digital agency Tangent shed light on ICT emissions and where we sit as an industry in the global carbon emissions story.

As the Technical Director at Tangent, Andy mentors a 45+ strong department, creating cloud-first, scalable, robust, secure, globally distributed applications. Andy is a champion for sustainable system design, diversity in tech and dyslexia awareness.

Andy covered “10 Do’s and Don’ts of Sustainable System Design” with actionable ideas and features of green system implementation and design. He also drew attention to the parallels between performance, scalability, cost saving and carbon with real-world metrics from some of the projects they’ve delivered at Tangent. 

In addition, we looked at what the big hosting platforms are doing to tackle the problem, as well as how best to measure your systems from a carbon and cost perspective.

As a final bonus, Andy provided a brief progress update on the work happening with the Umbraco Sustainability Team.

Read the full post: Do’s and Don’ts of Sustainable Systems Design

#3: Integrating AI-powered chatbots and search on your website

Nicole Rogers is co-founder at "Generative AI Copilots" - startup ai12z

Across all industries, organizations are exploring how to leverage the power of Generative AI. Everyone is talking about AI today, but how can you take advantage of this in the content management world? How can you leverage all the content you’ve created and combine that with AI to provide a great experience for your customers?

Nicole Rogers from "Generative AI Copilots" - startup ai12z shared how Generative AI can be combined with your content and your CMS to enhance your site visitors’ web experiences. As we’ve heard in previous conversations, Copilots is not limited to Microsoft and is becoming a standard industry term. Nicole used this simple definition:

An application that uses AI and LLM to help you perform a complex task. It has a conversational interface.

In other words: An AI-powered chatbot. Examples of how you can incorporate this technology right on your website includes:

  • A chatbot in the corner of your website to answer your site visitors’ questions about your products and services.

  • Digital assistants (aka “copilots”) to help them along their journey, providing personalized recommendations and assisting in completing tasks like making a purchase.

  • AI-powered search to respond to your users’ search queries with detailed summaries.

Read the full post: Integrating AI-powered chatbots and search on your website

#4: Introducing digital product equity

Christina Scriven joined our community, when she was a Toronto-based UX researcher. During 2024 she relocated to London and joined our annual Cambridge Summit in October.

Digital product equity is at the intersection of futures thinking, inclusive design and product accessibility. 

In another members’ call, Toronto-based UX researcher Christina Scriven from our design leadership community looked at how the tech industry leaders are approaching the concept, and offered ideas about how you could bring product equity practices into your organisation.

During the summer of 2023, Christina did an extensive industry scan of digital equity best practices to both consolidate key themes and to better inform customer experience leaders on industry approaches and in our call she shared her findings.

Christina opened her explanation by weaving in this quote from Adobe:

“Building equitable products isn’t simply about altruism—albeit there are endless socioeconomic reasons as to why it’s important—it also drives innovation by solving unique people centric problems, deepens market penetration, and builds brand trust by focusing on previously ignored communities”

According to Christina, there’s three key reasons why product equity and inclusion matters, which she summarises as:

  • strategic growth opportunities by increasing market share

  • creating an enhanced sense of customer belonging

  • alignment with your corporate values

Read the full post: Introducing digital product equity

#5: What's Universal CMS all about?

Preston So is VP Product at dotCMS and a widely recognized authority in the CMS space

For many years now, the developers and marketers in charge of digital experiences have been at odds. While the emergence of headless technologies freed developers from the restraints of legacy CMS frameworks, they left marketers in the dust, unable to manage their business-critical content. 

Both personas have unique needs and no one CMS can serve them all.

According to Preston So from dotCMS, that era of CMS is over, and recently industry momentum has gathered around this emerging concept of Universal CMS.

As Preston says:

“At its core, content is about people.”

Despite what sometimes overzealous JavaScript developers and architectural purists say, the content management system remains unique as a nexus of collaboration between disparate content and technical personas, all with their own prerogatives and goals.

Preston brought this slide to the call - an illustration he used back at DrupalCon 2017 to talk about the pressure and growth impacting headless CMS. It also brings home the point that the problem facing developers and content editors have been lingering for a while and looking for a better solution

For some brief historical context: Back in 2020, Preston also joined us for a members’ call, where he made the case for a new grand compromise in content management. Back then, Preston already talked about regrets from buying a headless CMS.

A year later, in 2021, Preston returned for another popular call on how key social contracts are fraying in the move from WCM to DXP. In this call, he brought attention to the same problem:

“When editors can no longer interact with their digital experiences as richly as before, they become convinced they are playing a losing game”

Read the full post: What's Universal CMS all about?

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