At the time when the warm New Year celebration atmosphere is all around us, it’s the right time to sum up 2016 and start planning great future.

Perhaps it was the most fruitful year for you? Or maybe you worked hard all the time to hit the heights in a brand new 2017?

You tell us.

There is nothing better than summing up 2016 in numbers. For this, our ‘Total 2016 Migration Tendencies Numbers And Stats’ whitepaper is here to equip you with the most valuable data to analyze.

“What is the future of my website/blog?”, “CMS in 2017. How it would look like for my website/blog?” A lot of our users wonder these days. Some strong predictions could be made.
But many things, inevitably, depend on you, like, how you manage and support your website/blog? And what are the best strategies which bring the greatest results?

Looking for some inspiration and fresh ideas to start a New Year with? Below is our biggest gift to you.

We asked CMS experts-you-should-follow for their forecasts regarding CMS in 2017. The answers made us want to look beyond the future and ‘do some action’ even more.

Enjoy 😉

Gabriel A. Mays:

For less technical users, open CMSs like WordPress will be increasingly challenged by more narrowly focused proprietary website builders like Squarespace, Weebly and Wix.

For advanced users we’ll see increasing challenge from static site generators like Jekyll and Hugo. This isn’t inherently bad, the increased competition will lend inspiration and force us to focus on improving key parts of the WordPress experience.

In the past WordPress benefitted from such strong product market fit and, subsequently, such high growth that there weren’t the typical feedback mechanisms forcing us to focus on improving key parts of the product experience. These new competitors are welcome evolutionary pressures and key in the continual improvement of WordPress.”

Dante St James:

My predictions are that 2017 will see an unprecedented number of attacks on WordPress and Joomla due to outdated core files and plugins/extensions.

This will force users to be much more security focused and tend to move off WordPress and Joomla to hosted solutions such as Wix, Squarespace and semi-managed WordPress and Joomla installations on hosts such as Siteground.”

Jeff Starr:

2017 will be another year of rapid change on the Web. WordPress will continue to gain market share, but it’s getting too bloated and sort of lost in terms of its own direction, trying to be everything to everyone, which is a strategy that’s doomed to fail in the long run.

I see the trend in more specialized, focused, and lighter content systems continue to explode, giving users smarter, better-fit options. Eventually, a handful of the smaller, leaner, hungrier apps will rise to eat WP’s lunch in the years ahead. “

Alex Vasquez:

I think we’ll see more and more inventive ways that developers will use the REST API to provide solutions to address complex demands and use cases, especially with regards to mobile.

In particular, Alley Interactive’s use of the REST API to build the Guggenheim’s new site. It’s performant and beautiful.

The folks from Ninja Forms are looking to do a fully hosted form building service that can be used anywhere. It’s pretty amazing and I’m excited to see what’s coming down the pipe in the new year. “

Mitch Pirtle:

“Future of CMS:

We have dominant players that are mature and established – WordPress for blogging, Joomla! for corporate/marketing, and Drupal for community. All of these are headed for obsolescence without making huge strides forward to keep up with evolving technologies and norms: mobile integration, cloud deployment, CI/CD practices, and more.

Legacy LAMP architectures are too brittle and time consuming in this regard; and I think this frustration is what led to the static generators of today like Hugo, Hexo and Jekyll. Also better/native integration needs to happen with content-specific power tools such as Elasticsearch.

Future of Joomla!:

When we were founding Joomla!, we focused on full separation of the framework from the CMS applications, better plugin infrastructure for external services like Facebook Connect and CDNs, and offering the ability to use either Mootools or Jquery.

What Joomla! needs to focus on now is fully decoupling the front-end rendering and turning the CMS into a RESTful service, so you can accommodate many different clients (web, mobile native, standalone apps) and third party services to really add power and flexibility for both developers and end users.

Lastly I’d love to see Joomla! break out of the “full stack” legacy mindset and embrace a more distributed architecture (natively support RDS & S3 for instance) so deployment and maintenance is not such a huge issue for folks that want to do it the Right Way™. I’d love to see a major CMS project really define a RESTful service API and support different platforms, that way you could go with PHP, Node or whatever your teams were comfortable with and use the same clients and apps. Or maybe I just want too much. :-)”

Nico van Leeuwen:

Tough to make a prediction 🙂 My best guess is that there will be an increasing focus on Security as a Service to keep data as private as it needs to be.
This will be combined with an increase in mobile performance and mobile usability.

For Joomla! this will be no different being a very flexible CMS with a great number of users worldwide“.

To Summarize

As we can see, when it comes to CMS in 2017, opinions differ. As the thoughts of various CMSs users. But one thing certainly remains – each idea could trigger a great motivation to start or continue a big-deal business.

‘CMS Migration Trends And Predictions For 2016 And Beyond’ whitepaper would gladly assist you in checking if the predictions from passing away 2016 came true.

Consequently, you might wonder whether your CMS needs change and how can this be a winning move? The answer is ‘CMS Migration Cost in 2017. Best of Services & Pricings Reviewed’ which might help you find a proper solution when it comes to money and the choice of the migration service.

What we can see, is that 2017 is going to be really ‘big’. Not only CMSs but their owners and users will experience a great portion of changes and open up more new horizons to explore.