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Episode 503 Agency Chat With Ryan Waterbury Alternative CMS


Show Summary

This podcast episode discusses alternatives to WordPress as a content management system (CMS). The hosts, Rob Cairns and Ryan Waterbury, explore various options, including open-source CMSs like Drupal and newer platforms such as Astro and Ghost, as well as Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions such as Shopify and Squarespace. They consider factors like ease of use, e-commerce capabilities, SEO implications, and security when comparing these alternatives. The conversation highlights a shift away from WordPress due to recent controversies and the increasing maturity of competing platforms. The podcast ultimately encourages listeners to consider a wider range of CMS options based on their specific needs.

Show Transcript

Hey everybody, Rob Cairns here and today I have my monthly co-host, Mr. Ryan Waterbury. How are you, Ryan?

I am doing good today. Testing out some new uh hardware.

Yeah. Oh. hardware. What fun is that? As always, I am not doing any of that today. So, and today we were kind of talking about in our agency segment, there’s lots going on in the WordPress community. I only want to talk about the drama. All I can do is go see X and go watch that mess go on and it’s going on and it’s going on. Um, but one of the things is people are scurrying around looking for alternatives and there’s all kinds of them. There’s open source CMS’s there SAS products. There’s uh page builders that hosts offer to build websites like some custom like the GoDaddy page builder or the Hostinger page builder to mention a few. And then there’s some really cool stuff going on. So let’s start by defining what is an open-source CMS.

Oh, uh So there are quite a few out there and you know for the longest time it was early on from the early 2000s when we started CMS options coming about and people were uh going through we had like nuke postnuke WordPress B2 Drupal Jumla and it really kind of susted out where we had three that that um were popular by the end of the 2000s to 2010s and I was still in the corporate enterprise um closed source at that point for most of my work. Uh so I kind of looked at it from afar and I was like but you had Drupal, Jumla and WordPress and so what was happening was blogs started to get monetized and the best out of the three for blogging was WordPress. So even though it was an inferior web building tool. The dynamic data uh and and uh the display was blown away by Drupal. When I looked at the two in 2010, it just night and day difference that uh Drupal views was fantastic and you could uh dynamically build uh websites and it was great. WordPress on the other hand was just starting to come around to you know custom post types. We had pods come out around that time with advanced content types to solve some of those problems.

But of course, the money was where uh people went, you know, so if you wanted to and blogging was popular. It was kind of before the heyday of all uh social media ruling the uh internet and uh so you know, we saw WordPress become a rising star and now today while it used to power about 44% of the web But I think that’s declining

a little bit. Yeah, certainly in the e-commerce space. I mean, cuz you got some SAS products like Shopify kind of jumping in and um and there’s a few others out there and uh there’s s there’s um Shopify, there’s Etsy, right? A couple others like that. And

it’s interesting that you brought up Shopify right off the bat um because one of my favorite independent Audi technicians. They don’t sell any products on their site, but you know what their site’s built with?

What?

Shopify, because it’s very easy to spin up a site.

And in contrast to some of the other solutions that they look, I asked them why they did that. And they had a guy uh on their staff that, you know, had a side business selling some products, knew the platform, built up a site in two days, and it looks great and it functions fine for what they need. They’re overpaying obviously, but and it’s not the intended use, but that’s where we’ve gotten to today. And WordPress is not not where it’s at. It’s not an easy CMS to set up. It’s not not a beginner’s platform at all anymore. It uh it’s evolved quite a bit. And there it’s not the beall endall. And I think with the uh mad rantings of the founder that we’ve seen starting, you know, this last year, people are looking out finding out that there’s a whole lot of people that have been on the receiving end of um Mr. Ball and WG’s rantings that have gone off and built new tools.

Yeah. Uh that uh there are a lot of good alternatives out there in the open source side, but there are a lot of alternatives in the SAS side. So, uh it’s not the beall endall. And I think we need to start looking at we always say it’s the tool. It’s just a tool. Your clients don’t care. Well, they do care if they want to update their content. It needs to be easy. They need to understand it and it needs to work.

Yep. And and I it’s funny going in this record. I read a tweet this morning from Katie Keat over at Barn 2 Plugins and she said one of the reason her plug-in company jumped into Shopify work and she’s not the first one. Yoast did it as well with the Yoast product before Bluehost acquired them.

Um is because with all this going on, she had to diversify and she didn’t need her all her eggs in one basket right now. Which which I agree with. I got to tell you, I don’t uh I don’t think you want your eggs all in one basket these days.

Well, and it’s unfortunate when it comes down to it for e-commerce. When we when we talk about WordPress and we talk about e-commerce, uh it’s WooCommerce. It’s the giant and everything else is dwarfed behind it. and and it’s unfortunate that there aren’t uh a lot of competitors. Now, I have put money in every um LTD round of funding for North Commerce. I haven’t uh used it yet. I played with it. I’ve installed it multiple times. I will be making a transition this spring

uh you know, and staying with WordPress, but man, it’s it’s looking more attractive to look at other things. And when we look at open source solutions, Drupal CMS uh on top of you know just Drupal you know the CMS but Drupal CMS when we talk about that product finishing out a solution it it’s a really nice alternative uh and very attractive and that one was just announced you know this what this last week we started hearing some news about it.

No no I I agree with you it’s um it’s really interesting In the e-commerce space,

there really hasn’t been a woo competitor. I mean, people have tried. I Themes tried back in the day with I Theme Shop or whatever it was called. A couple other people have tried, but there nobody ever gnaws away at the uh market that Woo got. It’s just been really interesting and I don’t know why

uh for the long and I liked Woo Commerce for the longest time and you know I uh for my comfort level I’m not a super crazy P speed developer, but I do tend to do my development with back-end dev. And I got to tell you, there are a lot of hooks and ways that you can extend Woo Commerce very easily. And um you know, when I wanted to do extra little things like add a field here, uh collect extra meta information, it’s really flexible and it it’s hard to get away from that.

And then you look at the ecosystem around it for the plugins that existed that weren’t um bought out and and brought under the automatic WooCommerce umbrella. Um, you know, there’s a lot of independent devs out there that still because of the hooks and the ease of development.

I agree. Um, and it’s interesting, did you even know that even Square offers a basic shop that you can integrate products right into Square and take payments right then and there?

So, that’s why I brought up Drupal CMS and, you know, why WordPress was so popular for so long. It was the plug-in ecosystem. You know, I I want to spring on that with the uh third party developers that, you know, I talked about Woo Commerce made it easy. Uh here, extend our product. Here are all these ways you can hook in and and do extra things. You look at, you know, now you mentioned Square, that’s a SAS solution for content management. Uh you know, we have Wix, um Squarespace, and And you know that the SAS side, those solutions were great for brochure sites for a long time. They were easy to spin up. Um, even you know, like you talked about the GoDaddy website builder,

right?

They don’t have custom, they didn’t have custom content types. They didn’t do e-commerce. You couldn’t do events. Uh, you couldn’t do calendar booking. Guess what? Since, you know, the late teens and into the 2020s, All those things are available on Wix, Squarespace, and the SAS solutions now have these custom objects that really held them back from, you know, being a true alternative from WordPress.

Um, Squarespace, you know, it’s not I looked at it, you know, when the drama started and it’s it’s uh it’s easy to get set up. Uh, you see a lot of restaurants, you know, there are a lot of really good pre-built, you know, themes out there and A lot of restaurants use Squarespace right off the bat and um that’s just it’s it’s kind of the norm. Uh but they’ve really done a good job of allowing you to inject code and CSS and style things differently and that platform’s matured. Uh even SEO there are some basic tools to you know add schema do proper markup. Uh Wix is the same. They realized that they had a hole uh in the SEO world where they were not very friendly and they’ve been making some big changes. Is it the best platform?

Not necessarily. But uh you know for SEO, but that’s even changing. That’s a whole another discussion with AI.

Yeah.

Sorry. And I’ll share with you um Warline NA who’s also a regular host on this show. Um his next video is going to be about which platform is the That’s for SEO. So, we’re already going down that road and we’re starting to look at options. And you’re right, SEO has changed because of AI. I mean, I know when I do a search now, I’m more likely to go to Gemini and say, “Give me what I want,” then go to and do a traditional search. So, I’m just lazy.

Yeah. I mean, Google’s for the longest time as they want to keep you on their platform.

Yep.

So, you know, that top of page stuff now is all Gemini. It’s all AI generated. So, you know, platform wise, you got to answer the questions that Google can crawl. The nice thing is they’re putting links back out to the to the actual sites next to their AI generated to give credit. Now, I think that’s a a plus. You know, when you look at the search, but back to alternative CMS’s, the uh the SAS platforms, of course, you pay for them and you’re locked in. They own your content, but they’re becoming more attractive because we always used to find small bit I used to small businesses that you know started with a a DIY builder uh you know or a visual drag and drop builder like that and they grew and they said hey we want to do these things like I need to you know book count book new leads in my calendar I want to sell things online and those platforms didn’t do it so you had to start over from scratch and what did most of us use WordPress because it was flexible and it was easy at the time I think that’s changed And you know that’s why we’re doing the podcast because there are other solutions.

Yeah. I

so agree you’re hitting this like on the nail. So keep going.

Yeah. I mean we’ve talked about you know a couple of the big popular um paid solutions and some some of the designers that I talk with uh that are in in the the niche, you know, the WordPress niche. they got nervous and they branched out and they said, “Hey, Squarespace is actually allowing us to do some of the,” and this is from a designer perspective. I’m not talking super custom development, but they’re finding that, you know, Shopify and even Squarespace is allowing them to do enough customization that they can pull off some decent websites that they couldn’t before and they could only do with WordPress. So, I think you’re going to see some market share shift with the design market

to ble to offer professional services on the uh paid SAS platforms. On the other side, uh and those paid SAS platforms, I’ve had Wix reach out with an agency partnership, you know, request. Uh I think Squarespace has one, too, where they’re definitely targeting WordPress agencies. They’re ready to get out of the BS.

No, no pushers.

Yeah. Now, on the other side, there’s open source and and You know, I talked about being a developer at heart. There’s a lot of really good um open- source solutions out there that are mature enough and and you have a handful of XWP devs that have started these and some not all but many. Um you know, you look at Astro, Ghost, um Raft, uh all these are starting to come up to be able to spin up a a basic site, produce, you know, blog content, and they’re starting to get add-on and plug-in markets that are maturing uh as developers shift away. I know you mentioned Barn 2 going and expanding to Shopify. That’s a natural progression for uh Katie’s organization because it Shopify is the number one WooCommerce competitor. Great great avenue to diversify. Uh you know, seeing these other open source CMSs though, if you’re doing something in another realm. Graph has a lot of really cool add-ons and you know these are they have both you know paid add-ons, paid you know hosting platforms or you can self-host all these.

Yeah, it’s true. I remember some platforms just as you were talking um right into my head. I remember an old site developed on a a system called website bakery. I don’t know if you know that one. It’s an open or CMS. There’s all kinds of those kicking around. And then the question is for a basic site, do you really need to go to a WordPress and are you just overblowing it?

That’s the question,

right? Yeah. You know, I mean, we we saw the rise and fall of Magento. Uh now it’s, you know, Adobe bought out the enterprise side and and it’s their professional e-commerce and and web platform and it’s great. The community version has suffered a little bit. It’s still going. uh along but that market share I mean that used to be the cat’s meow you know uh for e-commerce and in the late uh 2000s early teens but Woo Commerce came along and said oh you already have a WordPress site why don’t you just do your e-commerce here so we we’re going to continue to see this evolution and if if WordPress loses market share uh it’s and there are better solutions and there are it just depends on what you want to do Uh so what it comes down to is uh what do you want to do and how do you want to do it online. The nice thing is now if you pick a platform that’s not WordPress and you want to do something that you didn’t initially anticipate, you got options with the CMS that you pick. It wasn’t always the case that way.

No question. But I think you also got to look at some other things like if you go to um a SAS product or an open source CMS, if you decide to get your data out of there, can you That’s number one.

Then I think you got to look at security. I am a big security guy. Is that going to be a secure platform? Do they update it regularly? What’s the history of doing um core updates to the application? I think that’s really important. Then we got to move on to is how easy is it to do backups and do a restore, right? I mean that matters too. Now with a platform like Squarespace, they look after that. But I don’t know if I like that idea. because I’m not a fan of having everything in one basket again. So, we’re back to that again.

So, so I mean, we got to start to think about these options and these options aren’t trivial anymore.

No. And uh that’s that’s why and I still have yet to uh spin up an install with Drupal CMS, the the new product on top of, you know, the core CMS, but it uh you know, I see that as the the first true alternative to what uh Mr. Bowlingwick was trying to achieve with Gutenberg. It, you know, has all the custom content, basic custom content types you would want, like calendar booking, events, um, you know, some some of the other uh like team members I think was uh one out of the box and those are things I create, you know, those custom post types in WordPress all the time for building sites and it’s great. It’s flexible, but If they were there out of the box, it would be even better. Uh it would speed development time and it would uh cut a little bit of the layer out where you know uh that uh that barrier of entry I think would be lowered a little bit to uh start to see end users building their own sites again.

Yep. No, I think I think we’re away from that. Um as we kind of wrap it up, do you have any other suggestions? about what to look at.

I I think there are a lot of really good options out there and you know the fact that uh when I sat down and I looked at even you know hosting like runcloud or cloudways or some of the other even cPanel you look at the CMS options you can spin up it’s not just WordPress that are you know the quick one-click install to get started all the ones that I you know mention uh like raft uh ghost Astro, uh, even some Laravel custom ones that take a little bit more to install, but Craft is a one-click installer. I think Ghost and Astro do as well to make it really easy. So, even if even if you don’t pick a paid platform and you want to host something yourself, kind of like WordPress, and have that modular option, be able to control your own data, there are mature enough platforms there if you want to get started, and those are the ones that I would start looking at if I were looking at a WordPress exit.

Yeah, I would agree with you. Uh Ryan, go on over to One Dog Solutions, check out Ryan’s work. He’s uh I guess where are you? Mostly LinkedIn and X these days. Is that pretty well fair, you know?

Uh I rarely go on LinkedIn. I have I need to update my profile.

So X X X

X is probably the best one. I I get the least bro marketer spam there.

Yeah. Thanks, Ryan, you have an amazing day. Appreciate it.

Yeah, you too.

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