2024 CMS Experts meetings

The CMS Expert community goes back over a decade. We started in 2008 with the idea to bring customers, analysts, vendors and agencies together in this forum. In 2011 we then also launched a local chapter in North America and these days we cover broadly everything labelled digital experience.

Enjoy some of the highlights during the years below - more to come. Get in touch if you are missing something or have a fond memory to contribute.

In October, we held our first ever group meeting in Montréal as a follow up to the sold out CMS Connect 24 conference. Sid Lee hosted us and Nika Karliuchenku from TELUS shared a brief summary.

After over a decade of active membership, Jonathan Healey at idhl in Leeds finally got to host us in early June. He opened with an honest talk about about agency challenges (second generation leadership, vendor expectations) and much more. Also on the program was:

• WordPress wunderkid Ryan McCue from Human Made who reminded us how important Google is and alerted us to some of the recent big changes in SEO land

• The Life Of An Optimizely Developer by Graham Carr from 26 DX

• A marketplace update by Nick Condon at Squiz. Squiz is clearly making waves at the moment in both the US and Europe

• A path to find the true North of Content Management and a call to easier systems to use and support by Gavin Colborne from Little Forest

May in NYC…which was including a session on Universal CMS by Preston So

and Berlin…more coming soon

Also in April, Amsterdam…more coming soon

New insights can also come from meeting in new places and our growing Toronto community took it to the next level in April, where we met at Curatus, a cool wine club. Thanks for Chris Bryce from dotfusion for making it happen.

Ken Gray from Konabos shared these three key takeaways:

• Cathy McKnight from The Content Advisory started us off and shared many insights and provoking questions. I particularly liked, "content needs to be treated as a strategic function of the business."

• Sana Remekie from Conscia.ai was in her usual thought-leadership form and shared how their DX Graph and DX Engine are helping to future-proof the martech stack and connect disparate data into unified and enriched datasets.

• Mark Ruddock, CEO of Kontent.ai shared some key insights on how we need to be thinking about a "CMS" present/future that includes AI and how in the next few years we may simply "talk to our CMS" and within minutes have a landing page up and running on all desired channels!

We also had a guest star appearance from Ann Rockley, who authored Managing Enterprise Content - A Unified Content Strategy in 2003. The 2nd edition came out in 2012 and we shared reflections on the importance of content strategy, now more so than ever with the growing demands on content.

It's more confusing now to be a buyer than just 5 years ago. This was one of the key points earlier in April where we held our first ever meeting in San Jose. Thanks to Lucie Hyde & Titus Woo and colleagues for having us at the impressive PayPal HQ.

Among the key take aways were how difficult it is to navigate the ever changing marketplace. Expectations keep going up and the real challenge is how to leapfrog to the next level.

Our first European meeting was held in London, where MMT Digital hosted us and the room was packed. Among the participants were Paola Roccuzzo, who facilitated a a brilliant conversation on the "race to the middle", that is the perceived blurring of features and market fit between headless and traditional CMS. She made the following points:

• author experience in the 20ies cannot be just modelled on the long-form content lifecycle

• the content design/UX writing profession is either sidelined or cut out from the 'means of production': Figma, design systems and code repos

• none of them is a solution fit for content management anyway, so lots of companies aren't getting enough value from these disciplines: they just get what they often perceive as an expensive add on for prototyping who can't even check what's in production until too late

• they don't even know that headless could help, because nobody is telling them, and there's a shocking lack of case studies and best practice to be inspired by

• in the meantime the "design to production" market is full of Figma plugins, poorly thought through design system and DS tech, with a handful of heroes like Kate Kenyon bootstrapping content operations with ingenious solutions (but not everyone is lucky enough to have a Kate)

• and last but not least, sure, there's a need to check things before they go live, but how much static site generation do we see in this bold bright LLM-driven future? Maybe we need to shift the paradigm.

As per tradition, we started the year with CMS Kickoff 24 held once again at the Pink Palace at St. Pete Beach, Florida. This time we grew to about 80 participants and brought together participants from Europe and North America. One of the European participants, were Benjamin Mack who shared Being TYPO3 at CMS Kickoff 2024.