What's Universal CMS all about?

By Janus Boye

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.

In a recent member's call, Preston introduced us to Universal CMS and told us what it is all about.

The need for Universal CMS

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

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.

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.

Another illustration from the call - notice how CMS used to sit in the middle and then watch the next illustration what has happened in the industry over the past decade

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”

The fact is that the CMS has stood alone in its ecological niche in the software world, bringing together people across the back office to collaborate to push the end user experience forward.

Notice how headless and traditional/monolithic CMS have created a divide in the marketplace

CMS is what Scott Brinker refers to as the ‘elder Statesman’ of MarTech and neither headless and composable CMSs, with their focus on developers, and hybrid-headless and monolithic CMSs, with their focus on editors, have an entirely clear answer for what the CMS's future holds.

As many have observed, and Preston mentioned this too in the recent call, several of the pure-play headless CMS vendors have been keeping busy over the past years adding those ‘missing’ content editor and digital experience features. Contentful is an example with their Studio, which is a visual builder, where you can visually assemble your digital experience. At the same time, the ‘traditional’ vendors have added or at least more vocally promoted their headless features.

Still, it’s important to say that Universal CMS is not just a new way to say ‘hybrid-headless’. Personally, I’ve never really liked ‘hybrid-headless’, it’s been adding layers of confusion to many buyers while failing to try to sell the concept of simplicity. Universal CMS as a term draws inspiration from ‘Universal JavaScript’, which is JavaScript that works in every environment, as in JavaScript that runs on both the client and the server.

Introducing Universal CMS

The Universal CMS paradigm restores the grand compromise that characterized the historic web-only CMS era with its excellent stories for developers and content editors as first-class citizens. It’s an attempt to create a new equilibrium — restoring that lost balance.

Empowering content teams and developer teams as first-class citizens on any stack, any technology, and any channel — or in other words: Both content teams and developer teams are able to do their best work, beyond where hybrid-headless and composable CMSs are today.

To put it in bullets, a Universal CMS is:

  • Tech-agnostic (any framework) → universally developable

  • Omnichannel (multimodal) → universally editable

  • Stack-agnostic (any infra) → universally deployable

  • AI-enabled (any atomic unit) → universally generable

The below illustration shows how the Universal CMS fits in the stack.

According to our conversations with members in the CMS Experts group, that’s the big appeal and why other vendors, e.g. Crownpeak, are now also collaborating with dotCMS and Preston’s team on bringing this concept forward. In the call, Preston also mentioned that Magnolia and TYPO3 are joining the upcoming Universal CMS Summit on August 5 in Montreal. You can soon expect to see collaboration with headless vendors as well.

Dominik Pinter, CEO of Kentico, was also on the call. Back in January 2023, Dominik joined the CMS Kickoff 23 conference, where he talked about the marketplace confusion with an honest presentation on going hybrid to avoid the traps of true headless (PDF). He shared this quote after the Universal CMS members’ call:

“As a marketplace, we’ve now learned that headless CMS is not the right answer for everything, but it was progress compared to the old Web-only systems. Universal CMS is a concept we can support as it provides real value to the customers and the entire ecosystem of partners”.

Learn more about Universal CMS

Preston has already written about this topic on his own blog:

The conversation about next generation CMS and the latest trends naturally continues in our peers groups and conferences. In Europe, don’t miss the Boye Aarhus 24 conference in November, where we have a dedicated CMS Experts conference track and in North America, there’s CMS Kickoff 25 in January, where we will also talk about Universal CMS.

In the call, Preston also mentioned the excellent podcast by Larry Swanson. In his Content Management and Modeling – Episode 111 (!) he speaks to Deane Barker and they talk about the “race to the middle” in the CMS world: headless CMSs adding artifact-creating capabilities and conventional CMSs providing content-management APIs.

Finally, you can also download the slides (PDF) or lean back and enjoy the entire recording below