Since I wrote my opus hating on legacy CMSes, I have been kicking the idea around in my head here and there, pondering just what this thing would look like, from backend systems to code to the presentation layer. Never anything fully baked or worth writing down.
In the past week, I’ve come across two posts that are just brilliant. And they dovetail nicely together.
First, Stijn Debrouwere asks a hell of a good question:
And that question is: what would the ideal web delivery platform look like if our priority was to help us piece together different components, not build everything into a single app like, say, your average Drupal install. Existing CMSes aren’t built for that kind of environment, so we don’t just need to complement the CMS by leveraging different best-of-breed tools each with their specific focus, we actually need to replace the CMS with some kind of presentation layer software that’s better suited to the new distributed reality.
Then, Eric Hinton at Talking Points Memo takes a crack at answering it:
On Monday we launched the second component of this incipient media-death-star, our frontpage publisher - nee Baroque. To get an idea of how it works watch a quick demo we made. It’s fast, formless and - best of all - built completely outside of our CMS. Currently, MT’s publishing engine notifies Baroque to cache new entries but it would be trivial to plug any other data source in. Eventually, when the core API and datastore is complete, MT won’t talk to Baroque directly at all. On this day, we will finally loose the shackles of the monolithic CMS model.