A parking lot conversation with a dear friend last night lead to these thoughts of what is the 4th turning when it comes to content web?

1st turning: Static web using standards, but they are emergent in design and implementation. No conventions, Difficult to work with, complex, bespoke. This is the late 90s early 00s web.

2nd turning: CMS space given rise to help hide the complexity. The complexity lives in the workflows and process and the code is compartmentalized. This empowers a new class of web contributor, the "Site builder" who can glue pieces together but not necessarily extrude their own lego pieces from raw materials (web languages). It is insecure and messy but empowering to a larger market. This is the early to mid 00's

3rd turning: Front-end adopts component architectures to further compartmentalize the code side of things. CMS space over engineers solutions giving rise to proprietary deployment and hosting space to constrain workflows. A bifurcation of the CMS needs for small to medium sites from pinnacle sites. Pinnacles driving the market place of CMS solutions to the edge of complexity in order to ship (giggles) static output (see 1st turning). This creates an unsustainable scenario for small to medium CMS adopters, while simultaneously an unsustainable scenario for pinnacles as board rooms would rather pay a single bill to have someone to blame than host all of this complexity on their own. This is the 2010's.

4th turning: For large sites, I'm seeing the embrace of the no-CMS approach. The CMS is just process and workflow in a proprietary vendor or approach. The tool-chain is entirely open source and component based to constrain the design and structure to maximize reuse. When the complexity of the CMS market has hit a clip that you require dedicated vendors to house open source solutions, the importance of open solutions is diminished. This gives rise to PaaS options that engage in open washing. It's standards and frameworks and API driven which is all great; but you'll be locked into this approach indefinitely. Unfortunately, open source seeded ground here in the CMS space because no one cares if it's open and too complex for anyone to manage, it's also open washed. Open, yet unsustainable, is not really open for participation. You can see how the car engine is built, and maybe you'll even change the oil (updating a package), but only the truly ambitious would take the engine apart to clean it out.

For small sites, all of the above must be eliminated in order to ensure that the web doesn't cost the planet it's energy supply or individuals their wallets and ownership just to communicate online. This can be seen in movements around no-code / low-code (vendor / proprietary dominated with perpetual lock in), web site tonight click builders (proprietary again), or in static site revolutions like 11ty (open, extremely flexible, to the point of only empowering power devs).

There emerges a space for open source that is sustainable, manageable, understandable, deploy-able by a regular person, that doesn't eat all resources on earth just to keep basic, static content online.

We are here.