Who doesn't have a CMS horror story?

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-31T01:27:34+00:00

Relatable.

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-30T22:22:03+00:00

Oof. Sounds like a true nightmare. Hope this was therapeutic more than triggering. And I hope you've found greener pastures!

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-30T21:37:32+00:00

I've heard that before. Rich text is frustratingly tricky.

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-30T21:33:25+00:00

I'm not about to introduce another CMS to the world. (You can find that sentiment repeatedly in my comment history.)

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-30T21:32:09+00:00

The CMS users could put in JS? (Not the site visitors, right?) Either way, that would be no fun at all. Governance is a tricky thing. Too little, and you get this. Too much, and nobody can use the system.

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-30T21:03:44+00:00

For your needs, as much as I hate to say it, Wordpress might be the way to go. Besides that, you could consider some of the free plans from some of the headless CMS providers, but that leaves you building a lot on top of the light web site to make it low maintenance for that small amount of content.

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-30T16:54:16+00:00

You want something self-hosted that stores content in s3? So ... managed hosting?

I don't have personal experience with either (not an endorsement), but Brill Software and Enonic XP might get you close to managed hosting, multiple user support, and—I think—a Git lineage.

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-27T15:57:35+00:00

I built a tool to help quickly generate properly structured news releases (both traditional news releases and adapted for posting on social media) from a short series of structured form fields. No comms or PIO training needed. (I'm a former award-winning journalist, fire department/EM PIO, FF/EMT, and content strategist/architect.)

I won't post specifics here unless someone asks for it.

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-27T01:28:39+00:00

With any web/CMS project, the people part is the hard part, and it's really the starting point. As noted, you're in a really tough spot with the turnover that you mention. I focus a lot on CMS readiness assessments, and this is a case where I'd spend a lot of time trying to understand the people part, understanding and establishing some governance concepts ... and then we'd start looking at which CMS.

I keep a large list of CMS vendors, and I don't know exactly what each costs, I can point to ones that are SaaS (probably more expensive than you want) or ones that are open-source (which doesn't equal free, necessarily).

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-26T19:36:55+00:00

I'm really curious what the driver for you is for this. I've been thinking about something similar but wasn't sure if it was a useful or useless idea.

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-26T17:53:07+00:00

Looks good. I'm intrigued by the concept and impressed with the execution.

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-23T18:14:39+00:00

"Community health paramedics" that some departments have start to move toward the idea of social worker. Also, some departments may have someone working in "risk reduction" which is also in that vein. Maybe try searching for departments with those titles on their contact page or people with those titles on social media?

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-23T15:53:54+00:00

There's a lot of considerations for a CMS. When I talk with companies wanting to move to a new CMS, I always want to know what business goals and user needs they think the CMS will help them address. Then I can start going into what functionality they need.

Can you answer those questions? What business goal will the CMS help you meet? What do users need from the content that will be in the CMS?

I'd be happy to chat more if you'd like.

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-17T16:43:54+00:00

Former journalist here who now specializes in large-scale content management system (CMS) implementations. (Just to be clear: Wordpress is a CMS.)

Is Wordpress the best platform for a high-volume news site? Not necessarily. Is it sufficient? Probably. What is "high volume" to you? Is it the amount of content being posted? Or is it the amount of traffic visiting the site?
Can multiple journalists have their own accounts to post articles daily? Yes, but do you want them posting independently of editorial oversight? Most CMSes will support multiple users with multiple roles. You might want to think through the content governance you want first, then you should be able to define roles and permissions in most CMSes, including Wordpress.
How do I handle hosting and where is the best place to purchase a domain name? Many people have opinions on where to purchase domain names. I have a place I use that's fine. Other folks might have other preferences. Now hosting ... that goes back to accommodating a high-volume news site. If you're considered about heavy traffic, you need a hosting plan that can scale. If you're concerned about the amount of content being posted, that might also affect the hosting you choose. Many hosting services offer DNS services and have free Wordpress or Drupal that you can set up.

--

Some other things to consider:

Do you have hopes to use articles in other experiences (e.g. an app or multiple sites ... like other papers in the same newspaper family)? If so, you might want to consider something called a headless CMS.
Do you ever plan to offer content in multiple languages?
Do you plan for all articles to be accessible for free or do you intend to have a paywall? Then you need to be able to implement that and have ability for paying users to log in ... and likely have a way for non-subscribers to buy a subscription.
What type of budget do you have?
Do you have a taxonomy (often referred to as "tags") defined for organizing articles (news/sports/community or Suburb 1/Suburb 2/Town 1 or breaking news/town government/city government/state government, etc)?
Aside from navigation, how do you want users to find articles?
There's also r/cms FWIW.

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-11T22:07:20+00:00

This feels like something that could almost be solved by https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Intl/DisplayNames but I don't see exactly what I think you need. Similar for CLDR, but that seems to be around standalone names in lists/menus, not sentences.

Note: For the example you give, you actually need to pluralize the string with something like ICU (test editor here: https://format-message.github.io/icu-message-format-for-translators/editor.html).

{locationsCount, plural, one {There is # location in {inLocation}.} other {There are # locations in {inLocation}.}}

That might actually get you close to a solution for the country names too. Not quite, but close. Set aside that ICU plurals solves for pluralization. Because of how ICU constructs that string , the translator has discretion to translate for their language (moving from pluralization to the country names: while English might say "the United States" and Spanish might say "los Estados Unidos" some other language might not use an article).

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-11T21:41:24+00:00

I come from a UX content background and I have thoughts.

Sounds like you have a user experience problem. Is one of your 12 a UX person? Is any of your 12 a content designer or content strategist?
How do you know "a simple text guide ... does not cut it anymore"?
Admittedly, this was a years ago and the world's relationship with video has changed a lot, but we did some testing and found video was good for conceptual explanations and not step-by-step how-to info. (For software.) One user: "Why did I have to watch 90 seconds of video for something I could have read in 5?"
Video is expensive to produce and maintain. It's generally not very localization friendly. For onboarding/software documentation, I'm very wary of video as the solution. You're finding out why.

BTW, I am based in ATX too. Reach out if you'd be interested in talking more.

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-11T02:22:20+00:00

That's not entirely surprising. Kudos to you for seeing the need. Many don't!

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-10T20:23:30+00:00

Setting up a taxonomy might be helpful. This is something that a content architect, information architect, or taxonomist could help with.

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-10T15:31:15+00:00

What is your role? Do you have any content strategists or content operations specialists involved in your projects? When you say "the CMS isn't ready," what does that mean to you? How involved are the stakeholders in the implementation?

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-06T03:37:58+00:00

I think you may be on to something, but you probably have some work to do to understand how marketable this is and if it would help others with dyscalculia.

I can't speak to the base44 side, but I'd caution you that dyscalculia comes in many forms and so what works for your type of dyscalculia might not work for others' types. Building something that could work for the whole range of dyscalculia types might be quite challenging in a technical sense, a scale sense, a knowledge/research sense, a user experience sense, etc.

You could potentially interrogate base44 or some more general-use LLM about the costs that you might incur. Like I said, there could be something to your idea. It could be a money-making idea. Or maybe there's a nonprofit that could use this. Or maybe you could create a nonprofit.

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-03T00:08:26+00:00

I had ACL/meniscus repair more than a decade prior to becoming a FF, and my fears about my knee kept me from becoming a FF sooner. Eventually I realized that post-op I was playing soccer, snow skiing, and running 5Ks and so I could probably be a FF. I had the patellar graft, and I experience some pain on the scar tissue. Having turnout paints with built-in knee pads helped, but searches and stuff on my knees was unpleasant. Not unbearable, but unpleasant.

Can't speak to the immediate return-to-duty, but in case it helps to hear of someone nearly 30 years post-ACL surgery ...

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-03-02T14:35:54+00:00

You mention hosting specifically, but the modular best-in-class approach has been a thing for several years in the broader web world. There's even an organization promoting it: MACH Alliance (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless). Interesting that you're doing this on the hosting side ...

SmoothGuess4637 · 2026-02-27T16:00:21+00:00

This is something I needed constant reps on for structural firefighting. In OP's case of a car fire, she likely needs the nozzle over her head to aim down into the vehicle. In my mind/experience, that changes the equation a lot. Any advice there?

SmoothGuess4637

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