I just changed the theme. Not because I didn’t like the old Chunk theme but because it didn’t credit the author on the home page and I thought that was important now that hissohathair is contributing as well. It appears that editing templates on wordpress.com is not an option so welcome truly minimal, hopefully we will have a long and fruitful relationship.

While browsing the 300+ themes available on WordPress I was reminded of the elegance with which WordPress separates content from presentation and the experiences I have had moving from a CMS toward a set of APIs that serve ‘structured data’.

At westfield.com.au we threw out our Teamsite CMS a few years ago and moved away from the idea of a meta-data driven ‘universal CMS’ toward an API that serves structured data to our Presentation Layer(s). As any OO programmer will appreciate, this allows us to store the behaviour and business rules with the data – as opposed to treating data as an anonymous blob – and we’ve never looked back. We avoided the problem of an ever-growing database schema and ‘Business Layer’ by implementing an SOA but more about that another time.

We’ve been able to provide content parity across all devices by fully embracing responsive web design and we can do this because (like the WordPress themes) there is a complete separation of data from the presentation layer. As we start to move toward providing richer editorial-style content we are really starting to reap the benefits of this approach; we store data in it’s small component parts and then tag and curate this data. This allows us to create simple editorial pages such as the recently launched Curations but as we start to discover more about our users and their tastes through the power of big data we can start to tailor our content to their individual tastes and look to serve our content algorithmically rather than through creating pages as one would have in traditional publishing.

From my perspective, well constrained CMS’s like WordPress that solve a clearly defined and well understood requirement will continue to flourish but if you’re looking to fulfil a unique requirement you’re going to have to write a lot of bespoke code so why not embrace it and give yourself that freedom and control. Leave the off-the-shelf CMS for the brochure-ware sites and the big publishing companies that have the money and patience to customise them.