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Feeling the pinch with old tech, and are sizing up a new headless CMS? Here are the indications you've got Content Management Sickness and how a new CMS built specifically for publishers can help.
Modern digital publishing success relies more than ever on being efficient, cutting down on wasted time, and not having to duplicate processes with tasks like having to multi-write things for different channels.
You need to be able to send content quickly, to all sorts of channels, with the best SEO and other enhancements your audiences need to see what you have made. You want creative teams generating brilliant things, and developers focused on features which make those audiences happy.
What you don't want is for them to be bogged down firefighting creaky back-end tech just to keep the show on the road.
So what are the dead giveaways that your CMS is holding back your content teams?
Let’s look at the subtle and not-so-subtle signs that your old CMS might be more trouble than good - and some of the cool ways Glide CMS helps your people do things better.
Publishers are in the content business, so if the people who create the content are in a perennial state of dismay because of the tech they use, the business will suffer.
Journalists need publishing CMS and media CMS with slick processes which facilitate quick publication of content, because being fast to the page is a huge boost to your chances of good SEO results.
How Glide CMS helps: As a specialist high-volume content publishing CMS, Glide CMS is build from the ground up to assist writers and content teams to do their jobs better. This means things like configurable article types, multichannel publishing, easy insert of multimedia, no need to crop pictures manually, multichannel control, a full Live Reporting suite built in, and so on. It removes the need to exit the CMS for simple tasks which can be automated, so you can publish to more places quicker.
There's a "problem child" bit of tech the business relies upon but dare not touch - a database, a section on your site, or something critical to your content's USP - and it's all reliant on something homebrewed and unique.
Over time this bespoke solution has become harder and more expensive to support, and eventually become something with which no-one dare tinker. What was once a thing of pride has become the thing that keeps you up at night: making it work with a newer publishing CMS has become a major blocker.
How Glide CMS helps: Glide CMS is built on the principles of MACH architecture (microservices, API-first, cloud-native, headless) so it easily integrates with third-party systems by using APIs - even old and bespoke ones. It means that when those external systems and others you routinely rely upon are replaced over time, Glide CMS can make the migration seamless.
Have you ever sat down with your journalists and watched what they do? It can be very instructive. When we work with publishers we see all the ways time can be spent not doing content but instead on fiddly system and production tasks. It's money on a bonfire.
Things like cropping the same pictures multiple times, sourcing video IDs, finding URLs of related content, referencing data in other systems, manual SEO tasks, and so on. Their time is better spent analysing and creating the things audiences want and knowing the news CMS will do the rest.
How Glide CMS helps: Glide CMS is informed by the key things which help modern content teams, such as automating tasks like image cropping, SEO, related content, and more. Not only does it save time, but it means best practice and important business rules are always adhered to.
A publisher's development team should be spending time on things which generate revenue and interest from audiences, not back-end tasks and firefighting old tech.
CMS development is complex - even more so when it is a publishing CMS or news CMS with very specific demands - so just think how much product work they could do if they never had to get under the hood. You wouldn't build your own CRM, so why would you build your own publishing platform?
How Glide CMS helps: By using a SaaS platform like Glide CMS, maintenance and development issues are taken off your plate so your developers can focus on more productive things. One feature which developers love is Custom Data Fields, which allow them to define and create new content types tailored to your front-end needs across your sites or apps. It is designed specifically to let you configure within Glide CMS the sort of things that formerly needed to be built bespoke.
Publishers tied to old tech end up launching fewer things, as the cost of modifying old systems starts to hobble the investment potential of new ideas. The people and content cost might be low or even zero, but the cost of reshaping the tech behind it all makes the idea less viable if at all.
How Glide CMS helps: The system comes at full power on day one - all the features, all the time, including AI, text-to-voice, a full Live Reporting toolset, and everything else geared towards publishing success. Being a headless CMS means that making new front-end offerings is not tied to a CMS which needs extra work. Standard Glide CMS tools like content tags promote testing and sampling things like A/B testing, geofencing, and data walls. Glide CMS is built to innovate and minimise the cost to launch.
A publisher's skill is in creating excellent content for their community, not spending unproductive hours trying to second-guess the next tech trend and how it might impact them.
Publishers' attention should be on honing their own products, not on trying to keep abreast of every possible new technology.
How Glide CMS helps: Being a headless CMS again frees you from front-end tech trends of device-specific requirements which impact your CMS. As a SaaS, it means that new features are constantly being added and that includes easy sharing with new channels as they become popular and the ability to slice content in all sorts of ways automatically to suit the format and styles each channel demands.
Does your website look pretty much like it did a few years ago? Can you even change it within the designs you have - or is it a static entity with little opportunity for change?
Here's a thought experiment: if some seismic event happened tomorrow which struck right at the core of your audience's interest, could you "tear up" your site to reflect the size of the news? Or would it be same design, but different words and images, and nothing more dramatic?
Due to inflexible publishing platforms, many editors are hamstrung. For them, there is remote hope of clearing the front page to handle a major news event. Not because they don't want to - but because they can't.
How Glide CMS helps: Glide CMS has powerful page geometry controls which meet the needs of media and publishing businesses. If you need to wipe the design of your site and reassemble it fresh, simple drag-and-drop functionality lets you easily add components or rearrange sections - all without requiring any code releases. In addition, being a headless CMS means that you can update your site piece by piece without having to make a Big Bang change just because your old CMS is tied to the site too closely.
Perhaps the acid test of whether your CMS is cut out for modern media needs is your state of mind when you hear about a new channel you should be publishing to, such as a new social media platform or the rise of a new kind of device.
Is your attitude of great excitement, or of the nightmare production hurdles you will need to overcome? If it's the latter - you might have a CMS unsuited to what modern media needs.
How Glide helps: Glide CMS fully supports content reusability and multi-channel publishing, to promote content delivery to multiple platforms via APIs. This flexibility allows you to easily adapt content for distribution across various channels, whether it’s print, apps, newsletters, or others, and also to slice the same content in different ways to suit the needs of the different channels - so your journalists don't have to rekey or edit content multiple times
See how the Glide headless CMS enables your tech, editorial, and product teams focus on business objectives, not broken technology.
How does Glide Publishing Platform work for you?
No matter where you are on your CMS journey, we're here to help. Want more info or to see Glide Publishing Platform in action? We got you.
Book a demo
