Where the term CMS actually came from

The phrase shows up in trade press around 1995 and 1996, and it is not describing anything you would recognise.

Vignette StoryServer is the usual reference point. It came out of CNET, which had a problem most companies did not have yet: a newsroom producing a large volume of pieces every day that had to appear on a website, with the writers not being the people who knew HTML. StoryServer separated the writing from the page. Editors filled in a form, templates turned the result into files, and the files got served.

That is the whole idea, and it is still the idea.

Interwoven came at it from the other side, treating a website as a set of files under version control with a release process attached, which was closer to the document management ancestry. Both were sold to enterprises for sums that make sense only if you imagine the alternative was hiring more people to edit HTML by hand.

Two things about that period are worth holding onto.

The first is that the separation was between content and presentation, and it was pitched as a way to reuse content across formats. The web, print, WAP later on. That promise mostly did not survive contact with reality, because content written for one medium reads badly in another, but the architecture it produced did survive. Storing something structured and rendering it later is the correct instinct even when the reuse never happens.

The second is that these systems generated static files. StoryServer published. The dynamic database-backed page assembled per request came later, with PHP and with the assumption that a database round trip is cheap. We spent the next twenty years discovering it is not, and then invented static site generators to get back to where Vignette started.

The open source turn happened around 2000 to 2003 and changed who a CMS was for. PHP-Nuke and Mambo made a CMS something a hobbyist could install. Movable Type arrived in 2001 and made publishing a blog respectable.¹ Drupal was released in 2001.² WordPress forked from b2/cafelog in 2003.³ Within a few years the word CMS had stopped meaning a six figure enterprise contract and started meaning something you installed by uploading files over FTP.

The word survived the transition intact, which is unusual and slightly unfortunate. It now covers Vignette, WordPress, Contentful and a folder of Markdown with a build script. When a term stretches that far it stops carrying information, and arguments about whether something "is a real CMS" become arguments about which decade you are standing in.

Which is what the next one is about. If the word covers all of that, what is the smallest thing that still deserves it.