WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:16.160 Wonderful. Thank you. So, why would we reinvent the wheel? You ask. A lot of it, a lot of it 00:16.160 --> 00:22.840 came from kind of thinking about what I want to do as a technologist. I've been developed 00:22.840 --> 00:29.320 for 25 years, 15 of them. I've been working towards some sort of social good or good in 00:29.320 --> 00:35.240 the world. I really wanted to focus my energy in one area. I didn't know what to wear. 00:35.240 --> 00:41.440 So I just started thinking through where can what I do help. And that brought me to thinking 00:41.440 --> 00:50.600 a bit about essentially, to much, sorry. It started making me think a bit about my public 00:50.600 --> 00:55.920 library. This is something I grew up in. I mean, I really care about in the states. The 00:55.920 --> 01:01.680 local public libraries in every county or every city. And if you for a lot of people, it 01:01.680 --> 01:09.840 is the only connection to this greater world of information and all the things that are 01:09.840 --> 01:14.480 happening out there. And libraries are trusted because in a lot of ways that the only place 01:14.480 --> 01:19.920 that you can go, nobody's trying to sell you anything. Which is kind of a strange thing 01:19.920 --> 01:24.080 to even imagine. A lot of libraries are talking about being the third space for a lot 01:24.160 --> 01:28.480 of different reasons. But I find that to be a pretty compelling reason. When you go to your 01:28.480 --> 01:36.720 local public library website, they tend to be very, we call it anti-mission. The content says, 01:36.720 --> 01:42.320 we can't even find the content. The design says we're out of touch. But none of that's true. 01:42.320 --> 01:49.600 There's all kinds of accessibility problems and usability problems. They, most websites, for 01:49.600 --> 01:56.080 example, like in the search, you do a search and it immediately jumps off to the library catalog. 01:56.080 --> 02:01.360 And their library catalog has books and movies. And that's how people think a library is. 02:01.360 --> 02:06.400 But that's not what it is. That's like a third of what it is. So our whole thing is let's bring 02:06.400 --> 02:13.040 some of that together. Close vocabularies and ontologies are not native to any of the content. 02:13.040 --> 02:19.360 Management systems or the library sites that we've seen. They're just really kind of 02:19.360 --> 02:26.960 messy situations generally. So beyond the design, I feel the content management in itself 02:26.960 --> 02:31.760 gets in the way. They're hard to update. Therefore, they don't get updated as much. 02:31.760 --> 02:35.840 Therefore, people don't come as much. Therefore, there's not really a lot of reasons. It's this 02:35.840 --> 02:40.800 doom loop. And the problem to me, the real problem is I really love the library. 02:41.840 --> 02:47.360 Have to people in any given place and don't use it. And they believe that there's no reason for it. 02:47.360 --> 02:54.400 We want to show them there is. So, from a library's point of view, and we talked to a lot of 02:54.400 --> 02:59.680 librarians as a strong part. We have a lot of relationships and we maintain those relationships 02:59.680 --> 03:04.480 by really good support. For a library choosing a content management system is hard. 03:04.480 --> 03:10.320 It's impossible. How do you know what the difference is? Using a content management system is hard 03:10.400 --> 03:18.080 and especially if it's dribbled or something that's not really set up well, CMSs are not focused 03:18.080 --> 03:23.920 the way the library is. In terms of content or data, content management systems tend to require 03:23.920 --> 03:29.520 this process of discovering plug-ins and half the plug-ins you even see in the first two pages 03:29.520 --> 03:35.760 of Google search, or $7 a month, and then it's just like all this stuff. And it might break. 03:35.760 --> 03:43.760 Historically, so from my point of view, I think content management is the problem and in a lot 03:43.760 --> 03:51.360 of ways you look at CMSs before and now they haven't changed all that much. And what are the 03:51.360 --> 03:56.480 great CMS innovations of the last 10 years? You can find the last years innovations and everything's 03:56.480 --> 04:04.080 AI and year ago is all these different things. But so the most part is not a lot of great innovation 04:04.080 --> 04:10.640 that seems to be new that I know about. And I want to hear from you a lot of us being here is to 04:10.640 --> 04:16.320 learn a lot more about what you're finding out into this because we just can't seem to use Google 04:16.320 --> 04:21.520 the way that we used to. It's so hard to find anything worthwhile. But the things that I do know 04:21.520 --> 04:29.760 and all experience management, CRN, ZSEO, all great features, but not really good for anybody 04:29.760 --> 04:35.840 business. Talk about single-site generation, which we do a bit of. We love tools like Webflow, 04:36.640 --> 04:42.960 some inner or middleware like Twig or templating. Alternative data for GitHub or other places so that 04:42.960 --> 04:51.520 you can essentially have what we call better librarianship. All great for the technologists. 04:52.240 --> 05:00.080 The librarians are stuck. I think I'm hoping I'm wrong. Last 10 years, the block editor has been 05:00.080 --> 05:06.640 like the one really amazing thing that happened. And I think it really helps. And let's talk about 05:06.640 --> 05:13.760 life. But before we get to that, what happened? Where did the lack of innovation come from? 05:14.640 --> 05:21.840 And I feel like, I know, there's a lot of ways that this can go, I guess. But in obviously 2020, 05:21.840 --> 05:28.160 I started working on the CMS on a brand new one because I kept hitting walls every time I used 05:28.160 --> 05:33.440 other ones. And I would tell them my library technologist friends or code for 05:33.440 --> 05:37.040 lib or the people like that and they're all like, what are you thinking? There's a content management 05:37.040 --> 05:44.240 system out there. Have you heard of Drupal? Maybe. And the reality is, it is impossible to do well 05:44.240 --> 05:51.200 or waste of time. And then I got some expert advice. Oh, there's three years old at the time. 05:52.720 --> 05:58.320 From a guy that runs a company called Kentico or Kentico, which I don't know very well, 05:58.640 --> 06:06.880 then like, okay, great. I shouldn't. But then I looked at Kentico and like, what are we going? 06:06.880 --> 06:14.720 Is that Microsoft Word? Yeah, as a CMS. So here's my big list of what I think. 06:15.600 --> 06:22.080 I want to hear any different opinions. I'd love to continue that. First, CMS is our 06:22.080 --> 06:29.680 over-generalized content. The word content is an over-generalization of the things people create. 06:29.680 --> 06:35.920 And if you're creating content, you're probably not thinking about it, right? You're writing 06:35.920 --> 06:41.440 something. You're helping people do wayfinding. You're creating videos. You're doing things. 06:41.440 --> 06:48.640 You're not making content. There was a whole SAG strike in the United States last year about this 06:48.640 --> 06:55.840 very thing. And so the idea of content management being one thing that does everything, I think it 06:55.840 --> 07:02.160 can't be. I think CMS is our siloed once you learn how to do Drupal. You have spent almost 07:02.160 --> 07:09.440 all of your brain cells. You don't want to actually go deeper into something else. CMS data isn't 07:09.440 --> 07:15.440 very exportable. You can export the specific data. We have found nothing but trouble trying to even 07:15.440 --> 07:22.800 import basic data sets. So we had a actual blog all the posts from WordPress. Cool. We got the 07:22.800 --> 07:28.720 data. Let's import it. Let's see what's in here. Fusion Builder. What is this? It has taken all the 07:28.720 --> 07:36.960 things out of the system and just turned it into Fusion Builder junk. CMSs do not make data 07:36.960 --> 07:43.200 management priorities. All of them that I have tried are really just not naturally good at it. 07:43.200 --> 07:49.200 You have to add a bunch of plugins. It shouldn't be that way. CMSs don't make content crafting. 07:49.200 --> 07:55.040 The whole idea of a block editor is that it's just more of a joy to create or you can be in a space 07:55.040 --> 07:59.360 to create. That's not really a priority. They're really more like copying and paste from some more 07:59.360 --> 08:05.840 else. CMSs don't really help people make better content. CMSs aren't opinionated. They don't say, 08:05.840 --> 08:13.120 hey, this is at a 12th or college level English. You might consider a 10th or 7th grade because 08:13.120 --> 08:20.480 that's what this page is about. CMSs really require plugins to be the thing. I don't think that 08:20.480 --> 08:27.280 works very well at all. They're not collaboration tools. They're content workflow tools. You put 08:27.280 --> 08:32.560 something in. It's approved by somebody. Somebody looks at it for brands. Somebody looks at it for other 08:32.560 --> 08:41.200 things. It's just not as a system. It's not really up to that speed. How can we turn this around? 08:42.320 --> 08:49.760 One, if you are interested in this world, make a content management system. Peter from 08:49.760 --> 08:54.800 Kansas Coast says, don't I say do? Because every time you put something out there, if we can get it 08:54.800 --> 09:00.640 to be able to be useful, hey, it's going to expand the conversation of what CMSs can be. 09:01.600 --> 09:07.920 Make it objectively easy to use. You can't give somebody something that's either a blank screen 09:07.920 --> 09:15.200 or they just don't get it because it's just like, what is this? You do the UX work, do the accessibility 09:15.200 --> 09:22.800 work, make sure these things can really come together. As an export system, import system, 09:22.800 --> 09:28.800 preserving relationships, the GCSV file format that we're kind of playing with, 09:29.680 --> 09:36.000 it's a system that preserves hierarchical relationships. It preserves the parent child relationships, 09:36.000 --> 09:41.120 and it's meant to really be a way to manage data and then pull specific parts that you need out of it. 09:42.320 --> 09:48.800 Rich data management needs to be a standard out of the box feature, a CMS writing production 09:48.800 --> 09:56.320 studio. That would be to me. If the content is worthwhile, makes the creation of content 09:56.400 --> 10:03.680 enjoy, make the interface die-dactic. When you fail to do an alt tag, hey, consider an alt tag. 10:03.680 --> 10:11.520 The alt tag shouldn't be the file name. Yeah, you're not useful. Make the experience full 10:11.520 --> 10:17.360 featured first, make the whole site, and then have the plugins come in and have their parts to it. 10:18.400 --> 10:22.720 And lastly, make it collaborative. How I don't know yet, but that's kind of the fun, and that's 10:22.720 --> 10:31.840 a lot of the reason that we're here. The reasons for hope, there's actually some really kind of 10:31.840 --> 10:37.120 cool stuff going on, and a medium, of course, created the block. I think medium created the block 10:38.000 --> 10:42.640 editor. That's the first time I heard of it. That was one of the first times I feel people were like, 10:42.640 --> 10:48.320 hey, we're want to do something for the editor. Craft CMS out of South Carolina, United States, 10:48.320 --> 10:53.200 who's great for the developer experience, story block, has an image service, which we have. 10:53.200 --> 10:59.600 It's a super cool, specialized way to, it's like AAAF, just built into the CMS, not as a separate 10:59.600 --> 11:04.320 thing. And web flow, of course, is great for designer experience. There's a web studio and open 11:04.320 --> 11:10.560 source version, and most importantly, thanks for being here. Thank you.