Standing out in front of around 100 digital leaders is no small task.
That was the challenge facing contestants at CMS Idol 2026, hosted during CMS Kickoff 26 in St. Pete, Florida, in the striking surroundings of The James Museum. The room was filled with architects, strategists, product owners, and practitioners. People who spend their days making hard decisions about platforms, governance, and delivery, and who are not easily swayed by surface-level demos.
CMS Idol puts the outcome in their hands. By the end of the session, the vote was clear. Kontent.ai took home the CMS Idol trophy for the second year running.
What helped them stand out this time was not novelty, but relevance.
Read moreSorry folks. An AI prompt is not a product demo in 2026. It’s no longer magic, and we’ve seen it all before. It certainly isn't content management, and it distorts customers’ perception of value. We need something else.
CMS Kickoff is a fantastic event that provides me with the insights and perspectives I need for a year in the CMS industry. However, I think I was the only person to demo a content management UI this year.
You can achieve great things with AI, but in a sea of workflow automations and wait animations, two things seem to have disappeared from the agenda. It’s hurting the industry.
Read moreWhat matters just as much is who actually shows up for the conversation.
Looking across recent perspectives from industry analysts IDC, Forrester and Gartner, and practitioner-led recognition such as the CMS Critic Awards, a number of the vendors joining CMS Kickoff 26 are already well recognised:
Read moreWe began 2026 with an uncomfortable conversation about green technology and greenwashing.
Our very first member call of the year was an unusual session with Gerry McGovern, setting a very different tone for how we might talk about technology in 2026. Framed as an informal launch of his new book, 99th Day: A Warning About Technology, the session challenged some of the most familiar narratives in digital and technology leadership.
Read moreOnce again, AI dominated many of the conversations this year, but the most-read pieces went beyond technology alone. Questions around discoverability, authoring experience, professional identity and how teams adapt to structural change all featured prominently, reflecting what many members were actively grappling with in their day-to-day work.
As the year comes to a close, we like to pause and look back. Boye & Co is built around conversation and learning together, often in the same room, but sharing those insights more widely is just as important. The blog remains one of the ways we do that: capturing ideas, discussions and perspectives while they are still forming.
In 2025, we published 52 blog posts, up from 35 in 2024, covering everything from AI and CMS evolution to sustainability, equity and the human side of digital work. Keeping with tradition, here are five popular pieces that resonated most with our community, based on readership, engagement and ongoing discussion. Selecting just five from a much larger body of work is never quite fair, but it does offer a useful snapshot of what mattered most this year. As always, the list is presented in alphabetical order.
Read moreA year-end reflection on six books that slowed me down and shaped my thinking, including Careless People, How to Do Nothing, If There Is a Will, There Is a Way, How to Resist Amazon (and Why), How to Know a Person, and This Is for Everyone.
Together, they offered fewer answers, better questions, and a timely counterweight to the speed, noise, and incentives of life online.
Read moreThe traffic collapse is real. Around 800 million weekly users of ChatGPT are already changing how people search, alongside growing audiences for Gemini, Perplexity and other AI services. With more than half of all searches now ending without a click, some organisations are experiencing traffic losses of up to 90%.
These are no longer edge cases or future warnings. Over the past year, AI-generated answers have started to satisfy user intent before visitors ever reach a website, fundamentally changing how visibility, authority and value are created online.
In last week’s end-of-year member’s call, we explored what this shift really means in practice with Jörg Schäffer, a Hamburg-based product marketing leader with more than a decade of experience working at the intersection of content platforms, search and digital commerce
Read moreOver the past decade, I have spent approximately $194,345 USD on themes, subscriptions, hosting, plugins, templates, and licensed media across multiple content management systems. That figure is not an exaggeration, nor is it unusual for organizations that have operated at scale in the CMS ecosystem. What makes it notable is not the amount, but the outcome: despite significant investment, much of this spend produced little durable, compounding value.
This experience is not unique. It is a structural characteristic of how traditional CMS platforms evolved. Tooling, plugins, and hosting models optimized for flexibility and extensibility, but often at the cost of long-term resilience, portability, and efficiency. Over time, complexity became normalized.
As the former owner of a hosting company, an advertising agency specializing in CMS, a board member of Open Source Matters and Joomla, CMO of Magnolia and CMO of Jahia, I believe….
Read moreDigital products are getting smarter and more energy intensive, and AI is accelerating that trend. Many teams are now asking how to design responsibly while still moving fast. In that context, Sustainable UX is shifting from a nice-to-have to a practical necessity.
In a recent end-of-2025 members call with Thorsten Jonas, we explored the latest developments shaping the Sustainable UX Network as it moves towards 2026. Thorsten is known for using memorable quotes to anchor complex topics, and he left us with a fitting one by Jane Goodall, a long-standing environmental advocate known for her work on the relationship between humans and the natural world.
“Just remember that every day you live, you make an impact on the planet.”
As sustainability pressures grow and AI reshapes the digital landscape, the network is gaining momentum around shared methods, tools, and collaborations that help organisations make sustainability a natural part of everyday design work.
As a long-time digital sustainability activist, responsible AI evangelist, and founder of the SUX Network, Thorsten combined reflection with practical direction. The session helped clarify not just why Sustainable UX matters, but how teams can start acting on it more consistently.
Read moreI thought I might retire this year. I quit a company I loved and left people whom I enjoyed working with.
I removed, unsubscribed and eliminated all noise. It took 3 months....but finally, I gained some clarity.
I’m taking the next year to focus deeply on a few areas: how to leverage AI intelligently for investing, how to rebuild and modernize existing applications, and how to redefine my own priorities as an entrepreneur.
This certification pushed me in ways I didn’t expect…
Read moreWe are excited to announce a new addition to our conference programme:
Open Source CMS 26.
Taking place on 20–21 October 2026 in Utrecht, Open Source CMS 26 is a new European conference for the open source CMS community. It brings together practitioners, digital leaders, agencies, and platform builders working with open source CMS in real organisations.
This is a focused, practitioner-led conference rooted in the Boye & Co community. It is designed as a place to…
Read moreI used to play it safe when booking conference speakers.
I picked the low risk options. Well known names, proven speakers, familiar companies. I knew what I would get, and I could build a reliable programme around that.
But over time, I started to question whether that was really what people came for.
Were we optimising for safety, or for learning?
For recognition, or for genuinely new perspectives?
Read moreOur annual collab meeting returned to Hamburg in late November, once again generously hosted by adesso. The atmosphere was exactly what makes this community special: curious, informal, quietly ambitious and rooted in shared practice.
People arrived from across industries and regions, filling the room with a mix that has become a hallmark of these meetings. Enterprise leaders from SAP and Adobe sat alongside public-sector teams from Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein, product companies like Cognigy, CoreMedia, Staffbase, and StreamX, and a strong delegation from agency members including B13, Monday Consulting, and Sitegeist. The result felt less like an event and more like a working session with friends.
This year’s agenda reflected the shifts we are all navigating: AI’s growing influence on design and content, new expectations in public services, the ongoing grind of accessibility, the realities of governance and compliance, and the very human work of values, culture and craft…
Read more"Belonging is not the warm glow after a team lunch. It is a hardwired human need."
This was one among several notable quotes from Antonia Fedder during her energising recent members’ call on The Business of Belonging. Exclusion, she reminded us, registers in the same region of the brain where we process physical pain. The cost of ignoring this is profound for organisations, while the upside of taking belonging seriously is decisive.
Antonia, who is a Hamburg-based designer and an active member of our community, brings a rare combination of clarity and pragmatism. Her work spans
Read moreYesterday’s Boye & Co “annual collab meeting” in Amsterdam felt like a mini CMS Summit Frankfurt: same open, curious energy, only in a smaller room with lightning talks on content, accessibility, AI and structure.
It was a packed agenda and below I have tried to share a brief summary of what we covered:
First up was Stefan Barac, who kicked off with accessibility and exclusion…
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