The best view is from above

In the past six months we have taken the time to think about the future of Plate together. Until late at night, we talked during sessions about the developments in the CMS landscape and how we can respond to them with Plate. What's going on?

If you look at the landscape of Content Management Systems it is polarized. I sometimes jokingly compare it to the political landscape in the Netherlands. On the one hand, trends like no-code and low-code are contributing significantly to the enormous popularity of platforms like Wix, Weebly, Squarespace and Webflow and on the other hand, the development towards omnichannel content is accelerating the adoption of headless CMSs.

The 'middle' of the CMS market, where traditional CMSs like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are located, does not have a strong answer to both developments and is losing market share.

Two worlds colliding

Based on the trends mentioned above, we can distinguish two worlds that collide with each other: the world of marketing and the world of IT. The world of marketing is the world of dynamic content, of conversion; ensuring that your message reaches the right target group at the right time, preferably personalized. The world of IT is the world of complex data models, servers, security, integrations and the right tech stack (MACH).

When selecting a CMS, you often see that the larger the company, the more complex the IT architecture and the more Content Management risks becoming an IT party. Headless Content Management platforms can handle the complexity of an organization like no other which is also why the adoption of headless has been driven by developers. But once the implementation process is complete, they come to the surprise that the content editors are not so happy.

Headless mindset

Headless content management requires a different mindset. Where content marketers used to work with sitemaps, they now get to see 'unstructured' lists of content within their new headless CMS. Customizing the homepage has suddenly become a difficult task. By the way, we should not only look critically at the software here. Poor implementations are also a reason that headless CMS projects fail.

Time will tell if headless CMSs will gain a foothold within the marketing departments of organizations. You can see established headless providers experimenting with solutions to improve the user experience for content editors. Relative newcomer Storyblok profiles itself as 'the first headless CMS that works for both developers and business users' with visual editing capabilities.

However, now that data and form are separated, it remains a tricky exercise to bring them back together. At Plate, we liken this challenge to a narrow mountain path leading to a high mountain peak. It is difficult to walk, you regularly encounter obstacles, but once you reach the top, you have the best view.

Our challenge

Plate wants to bring the worlds of IT and marketing closer together. We have been working on this since the start of the development of our platform in 2014 when we positioned Plate between the website builders and the traditional CMSs that require too much technical knowledge from content editors.

We are not choosing the easiest path and will have to push boundaries with each other, but we see it as a great challenge to make a difference for this target group in the wildly interesting and dynamic market of Content Management.

Think with us

The next six months will be spent building the MVP of a new product with which content marketers can build omnichannel content experiences in a visual way. Via delta.getplate.com we will regularly share our experiences, thoughts and ideas with you.

Sign up and think along in the realization of the CMS of the future.