What's in a DXP?, GraphCMS raises €2.5M, Iceberg for WordPress, and more — The Business of CMS Issue 5

In issue 3, we reported that Gartner was ending the Magic Quadrant for content management platforms. CMS-Connected took the opportunity to ask representatives from 9 CMS vendors, including Sitecore, Acquia, and Episerver, how they feel about it — and whether the “DXP” (digital experience platform) is really what’s next.

For me, the concept of a DXP is mostly philosophical (how me a purpose-built end-to-end DXP and maybe I’ll change my tune), but that philosophical stance is important: it points toward a world where content meets you where you are, is tailored to your interests, and adapts to changing conditions. Not every business needs (or can support maintaining) a digital experience platform of their own, but those that do will find the integrative capabilities very alluring.

Berlin-based GraphCMS announced a €2.5 million round of seed funding (that’s $2.7 million US, for those keeping track). Raising money isn’t always easy, especially in a pandemic, but this raise seems to point to investor confidence in the product, which does offer an impressive engineering pedigree (based on the popular GraphQL software) and a compelling marketing angle (focus on omni-channel content delivered to all your “front ends”). GraphCMS continues to be a platform to watch.

Contentful shared a link to their developer community group on LinkedIn, and it looks like a great place to chat with others building with this popular headless content management software-as-a-service.

This online conference for the Craft CMS community was just announced, and is open for sponsorship and speaker submissions. There’s no date yet, but we’ll update you when more is shared.

Talks from the 2020 Adobe Summit, an event focused on Adobe’s Experience and Marketing Cloud platforms, are now online. There are hundreds of sessions to watch with a free registration.

Craft CMS announced Nitro, a new local development environment powered by Canonical’s Multipass toolset. Local development continues to be a surprising pain point for many platforms, especially considering how long we’ve been trying to solve the problem. Nitro seems to be placing an emphasis on speed, and I’m excited to check it out.

(For another approach to local development, which actually avoids the pesky “local” part, check out this week’s announcement of GitHub Codespaces.)

When WordPress’ Gutenberg block editor was in beta, one of the biggest user complaints was how it compromised the writing experience in favor of the block layout experience. Rich has been one of the biggest beneficiaries and visionaries in the latter realm as the co-creator of the Coblocks block library plugin (which he sold to GoDaddy in early 2019). Now, it appears he’s turning his attention to the former: creating a writing experience that can rival the best writing software out there.

Tony Byrne, an expert in marketing tech, offers one word summaries of popular CMS platforms. (One spoiler: his description of GeoCities as “COVID-1” cracked me up. Oh GeoCities, how we do and don’t miss you…)