Wonderful. Thank you. So, why would we reinvent the wheel? You ask. A lot of it, a lot of it
came from kind of thinking about what I want to do as a technologist. I've been developed
for 25 years, 15 of them. I've been working towards some sort of social good or good in
the world. I really wanted to focus my energy in one area. I didn't know what to wear.
So I just started thinking through where can what I do help. And that brought me to thinking
a bit about essentially, to much, sorry. It started making me think a bit about my public
library. This is something I grew up in. I mean, I really care about in the states. The
local public libraries in every county or every city. And if you for a lot of people, it
is the only connection to this greater world of information and all the things that are
happening out there. And libraries are trusted because in a lot of ways that the only place
that you can go, nobody's trying to sell you anything. Which is kind of a strange thing
to even imagine. A lot of libraries are talking about being the third space for a lot
of different reasons. But I find that to be a pretty compelling reason. When you go to your
local public library website, they tend to be very, we call it anti-mission. The content says,
we can't even find the content. The design says we're out of touch. But none of that's true.
There's all kinds of accessibility problems and usability problems. They, most websites, for
example, like in the search, you do a search and it immediately jumps off to the library catalog.
And their library catalog has books and movies. And that's how people think a library is.
But that's not what it is. That's like a third of what it is. So our whole thing is let's bring
some of that together. Close vocabularies and ontologies are not native to any of the content.
Management systems or the library sites that we've seen. They're just really kind of
messy situations generally. So beyond the design, I feel the content management in itself
gets in the way. They're hard to update. Therefore, they don't get updated as much.
Therefore, people don't come as much. Therefore, there's not really a lot of reasons. It's this
doom loop. And the problem to me, the real problem is I really love the library.
Have to people in any given place and don't use it. And they believe that there's no reason for it.
We want to show them there is. So, from a library's point of view, and we talked to a lot of
librarians as a strong part. We have a lot of relationships and we maintain those relationships
by really good support. For a library choosing a content management system is hard.
It's impossible. How do you know what the difference is? Using a content management system is hard
and especially if it's dribbled or something that's not really set up well, CMSs are not focused
the way the library is. In terms of content or data, content management systems tend to require
this process of discovering plug-ins and half the plug-ins you even see in the first two pages
of Google search, or $7 a month, and then it's just like all this stuff. And it might break.
Historically, so from my point of view, I think content management is the problem and in a lot
of ways you look at CMSs before and now they haven't changed all that much. And what are the
great CMS innovations of the last 10 years? You can find the last years innovations and everything's
AI and year ago is all these different things. But so the most part is not a lot of great innovation
that seems to be new that I know about. And I want to hear from you a lot of us being here is to
learn a lot more about what you're finding out into this because we just can't seem to use Google
the way that we used to. It's so hard to find anything worthwhile. But the things that I do know
and all experience management, CRN, ZSEO, all great features, but not really good for anybody
business. Talk about single-site generation, which we do a bit of. We love tools like Webflow,
some inner or middleware like Twig or templating. Alternative data for GitHub or other places so that
you can essentially have what we call better librarianship. All great for the technologists.
The librarians are stuck. I think I'm hoping I'm wrong. Last 10 years, the block editor has been
like the one really amazing thing that happened. And I think it really helps. And let's talk about
life. But before we get to that, what happened? Where did the lack of innovation come from?
And I feel like, I know, there's a lot of ways that this can go, I guess. But in obviously 2020,
I started working on the CMS on a brand new one because I kept hitting walls every time I used
other ones. And I would tell them my library technologist friends or code for
lib or the people like that and they're all like, what are you thinking? There's a content management
system out there. Have you heard of Drupal? Maybe. And the reality is, it is impossible to do well
or waste of time. And then I got some expert advice. Oh, there's three years old at the time.
From a guy that runs a company called Kentico or Kentico, which I don't know very well,
then like, okay, great. I shouldn't. But then I looked at Kentico and like, what are we going?
Is that Microsoft Word? Yeah, as a CMS. So here's my big list of what I think.
I want to hear any different opinions. I'd love to continue that. First, CMS is our
over-generalized content. The word content is an over-generalization of the things people create.
And if you're creating content, you're probably not thinking about it, right? You're writing
something. You're helping people do wayfinding. You're creating videos. You're doing things.
You're not making content. There was a whole SAG strike in the United States last year about this
very thing. And so the idea of content management being one thing that does everything, I think it
can't be. I think CMS is our siloed once you learn how to do Drupal. You have spent almost
all of your brain cells. You don't want to actually go deeper into something else. CMS data isn't
very exportable. You can export the specific data. We have found nothing but trouble trying to even
import basic data sets. So we had a actual blog all the posts from WordPress. Cool. We got the
data. Let's import it. Let's see what's in here. Fusion Builder. What is this? It has taken all the
things out of the system and just turned it into Fusion Builder junk. CMSs do not make data
management priorities. All of them that I have tried are really just not naturally good at it.
You have to add a bunch of plugins. It shouldn't be that way. CMSs don't make content crafting.
The whole idea of a block editor is that it's just more of a joy to create or you can be in a space
to create. That's not really a priority. They're really more like copying and paste from some more
else. CMSs don't really help people make better content. CMSs aren't opinionated. They don't say,
hey, this is at a 12th or college level English. You might consider a 10th or 7th grade because
that's what this page is about. CMSs really require plugins to be the thing. I don't think that
works very well at all. They're not collaboration tools. They're content workflow tools. You put
something in. It's approved by somebody. Somebody looks at it for brands. Somebody looks at it for other
things. It's just not as a system. It's not really up to that speed. How can we turn this around?
One, if you are interested in this world, make a content management system. Peter from
Kansas Coast says, don't I say do? Because every time you put something out there, if we can get it
to be able to be useful, hey, it's going to expand the conversation of what CMSs can be.
Make it objectively easy to use. You can't give somebody something that's either a blank screen
or they just don't get it because it's just like, what is this? You do the UX work, do the accessibility
work, make sure these things can really come together. As an export system, import system,
preserving relationships, the GCSV file format that we're kind of playing with,
it's a system that preserves hierarchical relationships. It preserves the parent child relationships,
and it's meant to really be a way to manage data and then pull specific parts that you need out of it.
Rich data management needs to be a standard out of the box feature, a CMS writing production
studio. That would be to me. If the content is worthwhile, makes the creation of content
enjoy, make the interface die-dactic. When you fail to do an alt tag, hey, consider an alt tag.
The alt tag shouldn't be the file name. Yeah, you're not useful. Make the experience full
featured first, make the whole site, and then have the plugins come in and have their parts to it.
And lastly, make it collaborative. How I don't know yet, but that's kind of the fun, and that's
a lot of the reason that we're here. The reasons for hope, there's actually some really kind of
cool stuff going on, and a medium, of course, created the block. I think medium created the block
editor. That's the first time I heard of it. That was one of the first times I feel people were like,
hey, we're want to do something for the editor. Craft CMS out of South Carolina, United States,
who's great for the developer experience, story block, has an image service, which we have.
It's a super cool, specialized way to, it's like AAAF, just built into the CMS, not as a separate
thing. And web flow, of course, is great for designer experience. There's a web studio and open
source version, and most importantly, thanks for being here. Thank you.