The evolution of the CMS: From SGML to the cloud

In 1995 I was working for Motorola, a huge US telecoms company. I worked in the GSM division, coding my first ever dynamic website. The site helped customers track software shipments.

Like most web developers at that time, I used the Apache HTTP server, Perl scripting language and CGI (Common Gateway Interface). Libraries of Apache and Perl modules saved me from coding the clever stuff. The site was hosted on Sun Microsystems pizza box computers with Sparc chips and the Solaris OS. The job was all about understanding stateless machines, HTML and the HTTP protocol, and not about how it looked in Netscape Navigator (the great-grandfather of Firefox).

Web interaction was very limited, but the simplicity of the web form was a new wonder for the general public, who had by this point been tortured for years by awful computer interfaces. For any remotely complicated interaction we needed a thick client (I coded a couple using the TCL scripting language, Tk and Expect).

In 2000 I was working for BT (British Telecoms), a huge UK telecoms company. I worked in the Openworld division, BT’s ISP for residential users. We ran a web portal for customers, which was powered by an expensive piece of enterprise CMS software called Vignette StoryServer. It was buggy, complex, and unfamiliar but it was a new wonder for enterprise customers. Vignette Storyserver combined components like templates, workflow, dynamic page generation, and even a page cache to bring proper publishing to the web. The TCL language was used in templates on the server side and Javascript used on the client side. Expensive consultants were available to build the system and train employees in its use.

In 2005 I built infrastructure for Interwoven Teamsite, another enterprise content management system with one of those eye-watering price tags. Interwoven Teamsite had content authoring tools, push-button deployment, and multiple site management. Expensive consultants were available to integrate TeamSite with enterprise systems.

In 2010 I rented a couple of virtual servers and moved my friends-and-family sites over to Drupal. Drupal did more than those early enterprise CMSs, and did it for free. It had more components than I had time to check, worked well in highly available, high capacity architecture, was up to date with trends like accessibility, UX and I18n/l9n, was widely supported – the list went on. Expensive consultants were available, but then so was a free support community. Drupal set the CMS base line that commercial products had to beat to keep their customers.

Everything evolves over time, including carrier-class companies like Motorola and BT, their IT suppliers and the technology stacks providing customer services.

One the technology side, the software we ran and the hardware we ran it on are long gone and many alternatives have appeared. In 1995 NTL and Telewest gave millions of consumers an alternative to BT dial-up by laying cable to homes. In 2000 PHP was gaining popularity as a web development language, and proved longer lasting than TCL. In 2005 PHP web frameworks starting appearing, and by 2010 there were more frameworks than there were coffee bars.