Beyond the CMS - A Content Management Podcast

Beyond The CMS #44 - Chris Bryce (Dotfusion) with Derk Majoewskij (Storyblok)

Derk Majoewskij is Senior Product Strategist at Storyblok, where he leads product discovery and roadmap prioritisation across the full product cycle. In four-plus years at the company he has worked across product management and product marketing, shipping features end-to-end from problem discovery through engineering delivery to go-to-market. He was the primary voice behind FlowMotion, Storyblok's native automation and orchestration layer built on n8n, and has been closely involved in Storyblok's AI direction including the MCP server and the Strata semantic vector layer. The conversation starts where most CMS conversations don't: not at the platform decision, but at what happens to content after the site goes live. Derk and Chris dig into the gap between a CMS that holds content and one that actively operates it, and why that distinction is becoming the difference between brands that show up in AI-driven search and those that don't. Derk frames it directly: content used to be static and humans made every change. The shift underway moves the human into a loop where agents, automation, and semantic indexing do the operational work. Chris walks through Dotfusion's own 140-node agentic content workflow, from AEO-informed topic selection through research, writing, governance, schema refactoring, and social distribution, all orchestrated through n8n and Storyblok. Together they cover the real upfront cost of building AI content infrastructure properly, why automation native to the CMS handles enterprise IT requirements that external tools can't, and how voice-to-content workflows are already running in production for franchise and retail clients. Key topics include: * FlowMotion: Storyblok's n8n-based automation layer, built natively inside the CMS with custom Storyblok triggers and actions already in place. One publish event can trigger translation, republishing, and a Slack notification with no external setup required — and no IT overhead for enterprise teams. * Strata: Storyblok's built-in vector database, in active development, that makes an entire content history semantically readable by AI tools rather than just keyword-searchable. Essential for any brand managing GEO visibility across years of published content. * MCP Server: Storyblok's Model Context Protocol integration that connects AI models directly to a Storyblok space, enabling natural language content operations, story search, and content updates without leaving the platform. * The 25x rule: Building AI content infrastructure properly takes roughly 25 times longer than writing a single post. The argument is that teams investing now build a permanent operational advantage that compounds while others are still starting. * Living vs. static content: Derk's framework for the shift from a CMS where humans manage every update to one where content is automatically updated, optimised for AI search, and made semantically available to agents while the human remains in the loop. * Voice-to-content in production: How franchise and retail brands are using a phone, a store ambassador, and a FlowMotion governance model to turn raw audio captured on the floor into polished, on-brand content without stripping the authentic voice out of it. The infrastructure decision you make now about your CMS determines whether your team is spending its time on strategy or on operations, and whether your content is visible to AI tools or invisible to them. 🎧 Listen now and join the conversation!

Beyond The CMS #43 - Chris Bryce (Dotfusion) with Preston So (React Bricks)

Preston So is the Chief Commercial Officer at React Bricks and the founder of Decoupled Days, a nonprofit conference on headless CMS, AI, and content operations now in its ninth year (August 6-7 in Montreal). Over 22 years in the CMS industry, spanning Oracle, Acquia, Drupal, platforms written in Java and PHP, and now React-native tooling, Preston has watched every architectural wave move through enterprise content teams. His perspective on where things are actually breaking right now is one of the sharpest in the market. This conversation lands on a problem most enterprise teams are living but not quite naming: the collaboration breakdown between designers, developers, and content editors. Both monolithic DXPs (priced at six or seven figures, bundled with tools most organizations never touch) and composable headless platforms (fragmented, developer-heavy, expensive to integrate) have failed to maintain what Preston calls the "through line" — the shared context that connects design systems, content, and code. Now that AI agents need to operate across all three simultaneously, the absence of that through line is no longer just an inconvenience. It is an architectural gap. React Bricks answers this with what they call a design system native CMS: built on modern React frameworks like Next.js and Astro, with visual in-page editing that keeps marketers within brand guardrails, and AI features shipping this month that generate complete landing pages from a short prompt — not just individual text fields — while keeping every component tied to design tokens and brand colors. Preston demos this live in the episode, including a real-time page build and a hiccup that makes it even more honest. Key topics include: The composable overcorrection: Headless platforms solved vendor lock-in but created a new problem: fragmented architecture and a collaboration layer no one fully owns. Preston argues the market is now swinging back toward something with more structural cohesion. Design system native CMS: Treating the design system as a first-class citizen in the CMS, not an afterthought. This matters for marketers who need brand consistency and for AI agents that need a stable, structured context to operate within. Vibe coding has a ceiling: AI-assisted website generation works well for a static site you are willing to rebuild from scratch. A colleague of Preston's recently shared data with a clear inflection point: once a company reaches $1M ARR, the clean-sheet approach breaks down. Stability, governance, and design system fidelity become non-negotiable. AI page generation vs. AI field generation: Text field automation, alt text, metadata — these are table stakes now. Every CMS does them. The harder frontier is generating complete pages within a design system from a short natural language prompt. React Bricks is shipping this now. The through line problem: Both monolithic and headless CMS architectures severed the connection between designers, developers, and content editors in different ways. With AI agents now operating at every junction, that connection has to be rebuilt deliberately. The CMS is the layer where it has to happen. Decoupled Days 2025: The ninth annual nonprofit conference on headless CMS, AI, and content operations runs August 6-7 in Montreal. Dotfusion is a sponsor and Chris Bryce is speaking. Tickets are $35 CAD (early bird, available while sessions are still being announced). decoupledays.com Preston's central argument: as AI takes over more of the production layer, the collaboration infrastructure — who can edit what, within what constraints, across which personas — becomes the most important architectural decision a team can make. That is what the CMS has to solve for now. 🎧 Listen now and join the conversation!

Beyond The CMS #42 - Chris Bryce (Dotfusion) with Joel Varty (Agility CMS)

In Episode 42 of Beyond the CMS, host Chris Bryce, founder of Dotfusion, is joined by Joel Varty, CTO at Agility CMS. Joel recently celebrated his 21st anniversary at Agility — a bootstrapped, Canadian headless CMS that has never taken a dollar of venture capital and still counts customers from nearly its founding days. That long arc gives him a uniquely grounded perspective on where the CMS industry has been and where it is actually going, as opposed to where investors want it to go. The conversation opens on a question that sounds simple but isn't: what is headless, really? From there, Joel walks through why enterprises are finally abandoning monolithic DXP platforms en masse, why the composable model the MACH Alliance promotes is different from those platforms trying to rebundle the same features under a new name, and why the best AI workflows are being built around headless systems right now. He also shares a live demonstration of publishing a personal blog post directly from Claude on his phone, straight into Agility CMS, using an MCP server connection and a pre-built skill — no copy-paste required. Key topics include: * Why bootstrapped beats venture-funded for CMS longevity: Agility has never taken outside capital, which means product decisions are driven by customer needs rather than growth-at-all-costs mandates. Joel argues this is directly why their average customer lifetime exceeds 15 years. * Headless as the AI-ready architecture: Adding AI onto an API-first, headless system is dramatically easier than retrofitting it onto a monolithic DXP. Every headless CMS has been able to take advantage of MCP servers and AI agents specifically because content and code are already separated. * MCP: the layer that teaches AI how to use your tools: The Model Context Protocol is not just a wrapper on an API. It contains human-readable instructions that explain what every field type actually means — so AI agents can act on your CMS without a developer interpreting the API for them. * Skills as the next standard for AI agents: Joel predicts that Claude-style "skills" — pre-configured prompt contexts scoped to a specific task like "create blog post" — will become a universal standard. His team has already built org-wide skills that pull simultaneously from Jira, Figma, and Agility MCP servers. * Content Operations, redefined: The content operations pipeline has always been idea to draft to CMS to publish. What's changed is that AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO have replaced the SEO ranking game as the reason content quality matters. AI models cite based on truth and structure, not keyword density. * Why DXPs are creating the problem headless was built to solve: Several major DXP vendors are now acquiring personalization, search, and analytics tools to capture more revenue — which is exactly the monolithic bloat that composable architecture was designed to escape. Joel says Agility is staying focused: content, done exceptionally well. * Data sovereignty as an enterprise buying signal: Canadian government websites, Scotiabank's Latin American properties, and Cineplex are all on Agility in part because of data residency control. With CFOs and legal teams now actively asking where AI tools process their data, this is becoming a board-level conversation, not just an IT checkbox. * The CMS as a diamond: Agility's product philosophy is subtraction. Their director of product frames the CMS as a diamond — and the job is to keep chipping edges off. Every recent update removes steps rather than adding features. Joel's example: a locales update that reduced the number of clicks for multi-locale teams, which sounds minor until you manage 30 locales like Epson does. * Stop making marketers fill out fields: The long-form piece is the only thing a marketer should have to write. AI should handle field population, metadata, and content model mapping automatically. When publishing is that frictionless, teams actually produce more content — Joel went from occasional to blogging two or three times a week. Joel's bottom line is that the CMS is not where AI should live. AI should live in the agents your teams already use — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini — and those agents should connect to your CMS through MCP. The CMS is the foundation. The cleaner and more structured that foundation is, the more powerful every AI workflow built on top of it becomes. 🎧 Listen now and join the conversation!

Beyond The CMS #41 - Chris Bryce (Dotfusion) with Mike Vertal (Crafter CMS)

In Episode 41 of Beyond the CMS, host Chris Bryce, Partner at Dotfusion, is joined by Mike Vertal, CEO of Crafter CMS. Crafter is an enterprise-grade headless content platform running major digital properties for brands like eBay, Papa John's, and Marriott. Before building Crafter, Mike co-founded a digital agency similar to Dotfusion, grew it to serve large enterprises, and sold it to Capgemini — giving him a rare, dual perspective on both the agency side and the CMS product side of the industry. The conversation starts with what makes Crafter architecturally different from every other headless CMS: it stores all content in Git instead of a database. From there, Mike walks through exactly why that decision matters now that AI has entered the picture, and how it shapes the way authors, developers, and site visitors all experience a digital property. He also introduces Crafter Q, a brand-new standalone product that puts a custom, brand-controlled AI conversational agent on any website, regardless of the CMS powering it. The discussion goes well beyond product features and into the broader strategic questions every digital team is wrestling with right now: How do you prepare your CMS for AI? Where does your content live versus where should it live? And as browsing gives way to searching, and searching gives way to conversing, what does that mean for the websites you're building today? Key topics include: • Git as a Content Repository: Why building around Git instead of a database removes environment-syncing headaches, improves security and scalability, and turns out to be naturally AI-friendly. • Headless vs. Decoupled: The important distinction between decoupling the front-end presentation from the back-end versus decoupling the authoring system from the delivery system entirely. • Headless Plus: The extra capabilities Crafter layers on top of a basic content API: embedded search, server-side scripting, and a full WYSIWYG authoring experience. • AI for Content Authors: How MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration and a native AI chatbot inside the authoring interface help teams draft content, populate metadata, and stay current with SEO and GEO best practices. • AI for Developers: Using AI coding tools like Cursor, enhanced with CMS-specific AI skills, to go from HTML template to a fully CMS-enabled site in minutes, and collapsing migration timelines from months to days. • AI for Site Visitors: Why every website will eventually need a custom conversational agent trained only on your content, constrained to what you give it, and styled to reflect your brand's personality. • Crafter Q: A deep look at the new standalone SaaS product, its beta results (higher engagement, lower bounce rates, reduced support load), pricing tiers ($30 to $400/month), and the enterprise private-hosting option for teams with strict data residency needs. • Owning the Conversation: Why letting ChatGPT or other public LLMs "converse about" your site means giving up control of the experience, the brand, and the backend analytics on what your visitors are actually asking. • Browsing → Searching → Conversing: The evolution of how people find what they need online, and what the shift to conversation means for CMOs and digital strategists. • MACH Compliance Without the Alliance: How Crafter approaches composable, API-first, microservices-based architecture without formal membership in industry alliances, and why that's a deliberate choice. • Built-In Personalization and 60+ Integrations: Content targeting with persona support right out of the box, plus a marketplace of integrations for more advanced personalization and A/B testing needs. • Three Ways to Get Started: Open source download, self-hosted enterprise, or SaaS cloud trial, and what the right fit looks like depending on your team's size and setup. Mike's core argument is that AI readiness isn't a feature you bolt on. It's an architectural decision you make at the foundation. Whether you're evaluating your next CMS, accelerating a site migration, or figuring out how to put a branded conversational experience on your website, this episode gives you a clear and practical framework for thinking about all three. 🎧 Listen now and join the conversation!

Beyond The CMS #40 - Chris Bryce (Dotfusion) with Tom Cranstoun (Digital Domain Tech Ltd)

In Episode 40 of Beyond the CMS, host Chris Bryce, Partner at Dotfusion, is joined by Tom Cranstoun of Digital Domain Tech Ltd, also known as "the MX guy." This conversation ventures beyond traditional user experience to explore the critical new frontier of Machine Experience (MX)—the practice of optimizing web content for the AI agents and bots that increasingly act as gatekeepers to information. With deep expertise in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and building large-scale corporate websites, Tom explains why the visually engaging, interactive elements designed for human users can be roadblocks for AI. He breaks down how machines parse content differently, why most websites are unintentionally failing to communicate with these "invisible users," and how this failure leads to missed traffic, poor AI-powered search performance, and lost business opportunities. The discussion moves past high-level theory and into the technical and strategic shifts required to make your content machine-ready. Tom provides a clear framework for understanding how to build for both human and AI audiences simultaneously. Key topics include: • What is Machine Experience (MX)? Understanding the fundamental differences between UX and MX. • Invisible Users: Why AI agents and bots are your new, most important audience. • Human-Centric vs. Machine-Readable: How interactive elements like accordions and JavaScript-heavy features can confuse AI. • The Power of Structured Data: A clear breakdown of metadata, schema.org, and JSON-LD and their role in providing clarity for bots. • Lessons from Accessibility: How designing for users with disabilities (WCAG) provides a powerful blueprint for MX. • Headless Architecture Hurdles: The potential downsides of headless CMS when AI agents don't execute JavaScript. • The Common Crawl: What it is, how it trains the world's AI models, and why your presence in it is crucial. • The 5 Stages of AI Readiness: From discoverable to transactable, the steps required for an AI agent to interact with your site. • Sovereign Data: The importance of owning your own data (like customer reviews) rather than leaving it siloed on third-party platforms. • SEO vs. GEO: Understanding the difference between historical Search Engine Optimization and immediate Generative Engine Optimization. • The MX Audit: A look into Tom's tool for analyzing a site's machine-readiness and identifying areas for improvement. • Content Freshness: Why updating old blog posts and historical content is critical for maintaining relevance. • The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): How standards are emerging to help agents perform transactional tasks. • Cultural Nuances in Data: How differences in date and number formats can lead to AI confusion and hallucinations. • Rethinking Your Content Strategy: Why MX requires a foundational shift in how businesses present themselves digitally. Tom argues that optimizing for machines isn't about gaming an algorithm; it's about creating clarity, structure, and consistency. The same principles that lead to better accessibility and a more organized content strategy are the keys to unlocking visibility in the age of AI. Whether you're a marketing leader wondering why your brand isn't surfacing in AI-generated answers, a developer building next-generation web experiences, or a content strategist preparing for the future, this episode delivers an essential guide to what Machine Experience means for your organization. 🎧 Listen now and join the conversation!