The Evolution of Web Content Management

If we built this city on rock an’ roll (and my sources on this are as incontrovertible as Starship and Mannequin 2: On The Move), then we built this web on content. HTML was one of the foundational technologies behind the web from day one and it is essentially a means of formatting documents to be served on the internet. Documents, of course, are of no more value than the content they contain. Today, we like to talk a lot about building web applications, but content is still the foundation to the majority of the web. Managing that content in the early days was simple, but, since then, the tools we use to create and manage content across the web have evolved to a degree that they have almost come full circle. In this post, I want to look at the evolution of web content management from the early days of the web to the headless, cloud-based CMS systems of today.