In the Chinese Zodiac, the Rat represents the beginning of a new day. I like that. Maybe the Year of the Rat is the beginning of a new day for content editors. Now that the headless CMS beast has been unleashed the race is on. Early CMSs didn’t really focus on editors; the interface was merely a collection of form fields, and most still look like that. The better ones allowed content modelers—who like to break things down into reusable pieces—a great deal of reign, but editors are still left puzzled about where things go. Finally, Gutenberg has set a modern standard for what a blob of content could potentially be when you allow editors to create “modern, multimedia-heavy layouts,” but that already seems dated in some ways, and likely lacks the control that those content modelers, who will ultimately save the internet, really need.

Headless CMS make life better for technical people, and I think this is where we’ll see the editor’s perspective finally addressed. Some think that the answer is on-page editing, some think that it’s “text as data,” and others composability or a combination of the above. I don’t know how it will shake out, but I think we’re close. I think the old Tumblr interface is instructive for how editors think, but Notion is the more modern take on ‘start composing and then assign’ type of editing, naturally (in 2020) in real time with your colleagues. There likely won’t be just one solution.

Carry on the conversation in our community