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Contensis Article

Like most businesses, colleges and universities rely on digital experiences to reach and serve their audiences. While many were forced to transform during Covid-19 to support remote learning requirements, they have often trailed the commercial market – following more of a public sector arc when embracing new (and often expensive) technologies. 
That's why they require deep specialization from their digital partners, and this is where <a href="https://www.zengenti.com/" target="_blank">Zengenti</a> excels. The software and consulting firm behind the <a href="https://www.contensis.com/" target="_blank">Contensis</a> CMS recently announced a partnership with <a href="https://www.hw.ac.uk/" target="_blank">Heriot-Watt University</a>, growing its enrollment of higher education customers to more than 20.
Contensis, an <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/lets-celebrate-the-winners-of-the-2022-cms-critic-peoples-choice-awards/">award-winning</a> composable CMS, has carved out a niche within the higher ed marketplace with its flexible platform offerings – which is further buoyed by Zengenti's focused expertise in the higher ed sector. According to the company's press release, Heriot-Watt plans to use the new CMS to enhance the digital experience for prospective students, alumni, and partners.
<h2>A CMS built for a world-class university</h2>
If you're unfamiliar, Heriot-Watt is considered one of Scotland’s most international universities, with more than 27,000 registered students, five campuses, and over 100 learning partners worldwide.
The school's previous on-premise CMS powered a website serving thousands of users, including students from over 150 unique countries. By moving to Contensis, the legacy system will be replaced with a modern API-first and cloud-hosted CMS, enabling the school with greater flexibility and scalability to manage its digital experience.
“We’re excited to be working with Zengenti as our partner for this major transformation project,” said <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmajaneleech/" target="_blank">Emma Leech</a>, Global Marketing Director at Heriot-Watt. “Their market understanding, wide-ranging expertise and track record of delivery will be pivotal in allowing us to rethink our global digital presence.”
<h2>A lesson for serving the higher education market</h2>
On its website, Contensis emphasizes the importance of content modeling, editing, and governance tools for helping content teams and developers – specifically those working in modern universities. Not only does Contensis deliver on these features, but its API-first approach makes connecting and managing content easier across websites, apps, and omnichannel experiences.
In addition to Heriot-Watt, Zengenti supports a multitude of notable higher ed customers in the UK, including <a href="https://www.kcl.ac.uk/" target="_blank">King’s College London</a>, <a href="https://www.lse.ac.uk/" target="_blank">The London School of Economics and Political Science</a>, and the <a href="https://uwaterloo.ca/" target="_blank">University of Waterloo</a>.
“We’re delighted to be working with the Heriot-Watt University team,” said <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/contensis-cms-writes-new-script-for-composable-and-headless-interview-with-ceo-rich-chivers/">Richard Chivers</a>, CEO of Zengenti. “This is an exciting and evolving period for the education industry, as leaders in the space continue to look for innovative new ways in which they can adapt to learning practices, hybrid working models and meeting the needs of its digital-savvy students who expect a seamless journey online.”
Chivers also mentioned a new Contensis feature called <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/contensis-launches-blocks-new-container-first-website-builder-qa-with-richard-chivers/">Blocks,</a> which was released earlier this year and covered by CMS Critic. 
“For developers, working with Blocks and React enables more of the team to work remotely in Contensis with a lower risk of change failure,” Chivers said. “For content editors and marketing teams, roles and permissions allow more changes to be pushed out, and its roll-back function can undo changes if needed.”
To learn more about Contensis CMS and its work with leading higher education institutions, visit <a href="https://www.contensis.com/" target="_blank">https://www.contensis.com/</a>.
<h2>About Contensis</h2>
UK-based Zengenti is the creator of Contensis, a headless Content Management System (CMS) with an integrated deployment platform. Contensis provides a single place to create, maintain and deliver content. Its content modeling, authoring, and governance features help teams create and keep top of well-structured content. Open APIs make integrating with leading platforms and products easy to deliver immersive digital experiences for audiences. Contensis powers websites for world-leading organizations across various industries, such as higher education, local government, and the private sector.

Zengenti Expands Focus on Higher Education, Brings Contensis CMS to Heriot-Watt University

mk-patterson

Heriot-Watt University and Zengenti logo icon again a wall of books

As a self-diagnosed cinephile, I can’t deny the power of <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000131/" target="_blank">John Cusack</a>.
He’s just… well, he’s John Cusack.
Talk about a body of work: in addition to his brief appearance in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088128/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">Sixteen Candles</a>, Cusack would go on to star in comedic hits like <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0146882/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">High Fidelity</a> and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119229/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">Grosse Point Blank</a>. He later dabbled with Westerns and psychological thrillers and even produced a string of veritable rom-coms.
And, of course, who can forget the modern classic <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1231587/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">Hot Tub Time Machine</a>?
IMDB listings aside, Cusack is perhaps most revered for his role as Lloyd Dobler in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098258/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">Say Anything</a> (the one with the boom box). It’s the last wave of 80s celluloid, set against the backdrop of a proto-grunge Seattle – and it singlehandedly crystallizes the teenage angst of the era.
I recently saw Cusack in person at a local film festival, where he accompanied a screening in a small, intimate theater. After the show, he was interviewed on stage, where he talked about the massive transformation engulfing the film industry – and how today’s tools enable anyone to tell stories with just an iPhone and an idea.
Despite this degree of newfound accessibility, Cusack also expressed frustration with large corporate studios that still own the mindshare in the market. He said they’re too risk averse, banking on “superheroes in tights” over independent films. At the same time, these large studios are producing and distributing epic work on a scale that smaller studios can’t compete with.
Across the CMS market (that’s content management system, not “Cusack Movie Syndication”), there’s a similar plot playing out. In a composable world where newer headless and decoupled technologies are powering choice, larger integrated platforms continue to provide an abundance of benefits. Organizations are making decisions based on a bevy of factors, such as complexity and vendor lock-in, but there seems to be more confusion in the script than ever.
That’s why people – both on the customer and the vendor side – continue to be important to the educational process, particularly as buyers weigh a shift towards the complexity of composable.
I recently caught up with Rich Chivers, CEO of <a href="https://www.zengenti.com/" target="_blank">Zengenti</a> – the company behind <a href="https://www.contensis.com/" target="_blank">Contensis CMS</a> – and we chatted at length about the confusion and challenges that the terminology presents, and why customer experience is still the star of the show. He also gave us a sneak peek at what’s coming from Contensis.
<h2>Coming to terms with the “composable” term</h2>
Since I last spoke with Rich in 2022, composable has taken center stage, particularly from a marketing perspective. While Contensis pitches itself as a platform that is beyond headless and more than hybrid, the company also provides some modicum of hands-on implementation. This gives Rich some unique optics, and I wanted to learn how he viewed the composable explosion through that lens.
“If we go way back to web 2.0 with Ajax, this [composable] stuff was being done – it just wasn’t branded in the same way,” he said. “I think composable is becoming something that people can hang on to. And it's a nice term that describes what we've been trying to get to forever. But for us, it's not really new.”
This reflects what I’ve been hearing from other CMS and DXP platforms up and down the spectrum. In fact, at the <a href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff23/program" target="_blank">2023 Boye &amp; Company CMS Kickoff</a> in January, several established vendors reinforced their use of APIs for over a decade, allowing them to integrate with third-party systems and power headless strategies.
Granted, this was before the Wild West of omnichannel, where CMS was primarily focused on the web. As <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/deane/" target="_blank">Deane Barker</a> of <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/optimizely-partners-with-google-cloud-to-take-experimentation-to-the-next-level/">Optimizely</a> observed <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/deane_do-you-really-need-a-headless-cms-activity-7051550183737757696-j-9O?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=member_desktop" target="_blank">during a recent podcast</a>, if you buy a web CMS today with a good headless API, you can solve more than one problem.
Rich echoed these sentiments. “We don't believe the CMS should be a CRM or an e-commerce platform altogether. It’s actually about getting the [customer] the right tool for the job – and integrating those services in the right way is how you should do things. Fundamentally, we've been delivering that for the last five or ten years.”
As Rich went on to note, composable is a great idea that solidifies what Contensis has been working towards – and in his words, it's fundamentally about APIs.
<h2>Is headless a kind of CMS… or a feature of CMS?</h2>
“It’s a really interesting question.”
After bouncing back and forth around the benefits of APIs and the Contensis position as a hybrid platform, I asked Rich how he felt about the moniker of headless. This was a heated topic of debate at the CMS Kickoff as well, bringing multiple POVs to the podium.
“If you think about what headless means, ultimately, we're saying that a developer can gain access to their content through an API in a meaningful manner – so of course, to answer the question, yes, you could quite happily say any CMS offering a great API can be headless. I don't think it's monolith versus microservice, the same sort of scales that move both ways all the time, becoming the separation between pure content and visualization. There's this constant sort of, ‘we want pure content we can deliver in any way’ versus ‘build a landing page and have it look like this.’ And, you know, we're curating. So going back to the headless question, yes – I think ultimately, it could be described as a feature of a CMS platform.”
But there’s more to it than that. As Rich detailed, Contensis is platformed for its headless capability, but it came from a heritage of head-centric features – and that was fraught with challenges.
“We effectively took what we had as a monolith provider and started again. I think for [any] monolith provider that's been used to delivering web content to a page with their templating system, they almost have to start again, because there's too many concepts wound up otherwise.”
One of the best observations Rich made was about the nature of CMS and what it means in a market of DXPs. It’s not clear – and to some extent, the emergence of visualization tools and other technologies to aid headless are further adding to the morass.
“There's all these sorts of gray areas,” he said. “Literally, where do you sit? Where do you position yourself, right?”
This is why listening to the customer is so essential.
<h2>Tipping towards growth with headless</h2>
Like many of his leadership contemporaries in the CMS market, Rich has a rearview mirror of experience that helps inform his vision. While the idea of a pure headless CMS is still relatively new, he’s been working with APIs for quite some time – and that brings some unique perspective to his outlook. 
I asked him to characterize the use cases that Contensis is seeing in 2023 and where headless fits in. His answer was resoundingly clear, but there was an interesting caveat about market maturity and persistent confusion.
“I'd say 95% of the opportunities we see today have definite requirements that you couldn't deliver without headless CMS from our end,” he said. “However, there’s a lot of misunderstanding out there. We bid for a Canadian university last year, and the tender process was actually cancelled in the end. They wanted an API first platform where they could do this, and they could do this. But then they wanted to drag and drop interfaces to do X, Y, Z. So they want both, but it's impossible to achieve because they're fundamentally different, right? We see a lot of people who come to us that still don't understand what [headless] actually means.”
Because of this knowledge gap, Rich and his team continue to engage with people to help them through the process. This is where a higher-touch, more consultative approach continues to prove valuable – particularly in the public sector, where Contensis serves a number of customers.
“We don't necessarily see us having massive growth in that area, but certainly from a business perspective, we're starting to see much more engagement from organizations who are properly understanding the problems, and then going, ‘yeah, how can we do this?’” he remarked. “But especially in the public sector, that need for handholding is really [essential to] the process. We're selling the idea of headless and the benefits it can bring, and helping them get to that place where they can realize it.”
<h2>Expanding beyond Blocks to Canvas</h2>
Rich and his team ushered in 2023 with a bang, introducing <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/contensis-launches-blocks-new-container-first-website-builder-qa-with-richard-chivers/">its new Blocks platform</a> – a container-first way for developers to package and deliver code while managing releases through a familiar Contensis interface. A “block” is essentially a package of code built as a Docker image that runs on the Contensis cloud infrastructure, allowing site owners to deploy and manage easily. It’s still early days, but he seems bullish about it.
“Blocks is giving us the ability to be to take a full philosophical approach to headless,” he said. “You can use any stack for development you want, but you still have a management layer around it. You have all of the benefits of whatever frontend stack or backends you want to use, and deliver it through this new way of working.”
From a developer’s perspective, Rich said the company is seeing what they’ve been dreaming up for the last few years come to fruition. This includes a new feature called Canvas, an editor they’ve built from the ground up for creating long-form content in a really elegant, connected manner that will enhance the writing and creation experience. It’s slotted for the platform’s next release at the end of May.
“What’s different is it's an object-modeled format, so it's still JSON,” Rich said. “You write a blog in long form, but you can also decorate and attach. As a developer, you can consume this and use the parts you’re interested in, throw away [other] bits, and still use it as a full object model. Sometimes, people just want that slight bit of extra flexibility.”
In terms of the rest of the platform, Rich said we can expect big changes ahead. One big area of focus is the platform’s <a href="https://www.contensis.com/help-and-docs/user-guides/content-modelling/site-view/an-overview-of-the-site-view-interface" target="_blank">Site View</a> interface for powering navigation.
“Think tree navigation per CMS,” he said. “It's very common in the monolithic world, but not very common in headless. We create an API, which people can consume, to deliver all that. But we have some big changes coming around permissions and different bits and pieces, and we've had to do a complete rewrite from the ground up to make that possible because of performance. We’re almost providing this… composable platform within a platform.”
<h2>What’s next for Contensis? </h2>
In addition to its upcoming release and platform enhancements, I asked Rich what’s on the horizon as the composable debate rages on. I wanted to know the key differentiators in a shifting world of technology stacks – and how Contensis is positioned to compete for mindshare in a crowded market.
“I think the one big difference compared to a lot of other vendors is that we actually do get close to the problems,” he said emphatically. “We make sure we can solve those problems in a really elegant way because we’re connected – and we see them. For example, if we’ve got an engaged customer and they have an issue they’re just not sure how to solve, they can pull in one of our product owners or development team members to take a look with their own eyes rather than it just being ten problems they’re trying to solve in a lab. When it comes to delivery, we do deliver for our customers.”
As I mentioned earlier, Contensis and Zengenti bring a sort of “rare bird” quality to their position, allowing their team to support a product while engaging with customers in a meaningful way. This speaks to the company’s culture and the leadership that Rich provides. At the same time, he’s an early-rising, self-professed code fanatic that loves solving problems and making complex things simple – and seeing what customers can create.
“Some of this Blocks stuff we’ve been doing, there are examples where people have done certain things that we just never expected. You look at it and go, 'Wow, we never considered that as a way you could use it or what you could do.'”
As Contensis continues to write its own script for headless and composable, its proven commitment to customer experience will be an important part of the company’s evolution and how it will shape its place in the market. Giving customers the right tools to solve problems is a critical part of its promise, and it sounds like Rich and his team are hyper-focused on this goal.
No one knows what the future looks like, but having insight from the past is what great leaders rely on. Unfortunately, there’s no Hot Tub Time Machine to get you there – you have to experience it, learn from it, and keep expanding the story.

Contensis CMS Writes New Script for Composable and Headless: Interview with CEO Rich Chivers

matt-garrepy

Spring is in full bloom across the Northern Hemisphere – and so is the "composable" movement. The phenomenon has spread like pollen, germinating in almost every conversation about the future of CMS.
That was certainly the case in January at the <a href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff24" target="_blank">Boye &amp; Company CMS Kickoff</a> in St. Petersburg, Florida, where the <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/cms-kickoff-2023-draws-global-attendees-focuses-on-the-future-of-content-and-composable/">"Great Debate"</a> over composable played throughout the sessions. 
As you dodge the discomfort of allergies, you might wonder: how much attention is being paid to this composable stuff?
According to <a href="https://www.zengenti.com/" target="_blank">Zengenti</a>, the company behind <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/contensis-cms-looks-ahead-with-headless-focuses-on-performance-interview-with-ceo-richard-chivers/">Contensis CMS</a>, part of the answer lies with Google. Based on recent monitoring, the search volume for the keyword phrase “composable CMS” has doubled – or even tripled – over the last few months, reflecting a sharp rise in the market's interest. 
<h2>So what’s the buzz about?</h2>
For more detail on how the honey was made, Zengenti provided a peek inside the beehive.
In data collected between November 2022 and January 2023, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/google-announces-sunset-of-google-optimize-and-optimize-360/">Google</a> searches for the term “composable CMS” were up by a substantial 300% in the United Kingdom and 150% in the United States. The sampling was tracked using the <a href="https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7337243?hl=en" target="_blank">Google Keyword Planner</a>, and Zengenti applied the query to 15 different countries, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
While the U.K. and the U.S. realized the most dramatic increase, Germany also doubled its percentage from previous months. When applied to all 15 countries, the total global uptick was 143%.
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-chivers-34a36b11/" target="_blank">Richard Chivers</a>, chief executive officer of Zengenti, weighed in on the buzzworthy increases.
“While the term ‘composable’ in the context of digital systems and content management has been around for a couple of years, we are now seeing it enter our combined consciousness on a much greater scale,” Chivers said. “It’s not surprising. We believe that as an agile-aligned technology, it will be transformative for enterprises of all sizes, ushering in a period of even greater and more rapid digital innovation.”
<h2>What is a composable CMS?</h2>
A <a href="https://enonic.com/blog/composable-architecture-the-cms-as-your-digital-experience-orchestrator#:~:text=A%20composable%20CMS%20is%20the,and%20can%20be%20continuously%20improved." target="_blank">composable CMS</a> is an API-driven content management system that marshals the capabilities of a headless CMS with an API orchestrator – sometimes referred to as a composer – all in one. Rather than behaving as just another endpoint in an API-based ecosystem, a composable CMS helps teams work more efficiently by eliminating the monolithic vendor limitations while still enabling integrations with other platforms.
Unlike a composable DXP, which includes headless CMS as a layer and an endpoint, a composable CMS might also provide traditional functionality that marketers rely on for websites – such as in-context previews, inline visual editing via WYSIWYG, and more – all while handling integrations and APIs. 
“For many site owners, particularly those in medium and large businesses, they are operating dynamic websites with multiple third-party integrations, and with multiple technologies co-existing in different programming languages,” said Chivers. “Embracing composable systems will make it much easier to give oversight and complete control to rapidly set new features live or roll-back functionality."
Experts believe <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/mach-alliance-roundtable-focuses-on-composability-and-innovation-as-economic-activators-in-2023/">composability</a> will be one of the defining technology trends of 2023, <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Is-composable-business-the-most-essential-technology-trend-to-meet-the-challenges-of-2023-and-beyond" target="_blank">including Gartner</a>, which believes 70% of medium and large businesses will feature it as a key criterion when planning applications this year.
As global markets remain unsettled – and the likelihood of a recession looms on the horizon – many businesses are focusing on optimization and productivity across their digital properties. While investments in enterprise software are already softening, composable solutions are presenting an opportunity to improve agility and accelerate time to market for content and digital experiences. 
"Especially at a time of economic uncertainty, [composable CMS] makes it possible for businesses to be more agile," said Chivers, "giving customers what they want quickly all while delivering a better experience.”
The hive mind is certainly buzzing with interest in composability. Will it continue to bloom in 2023?
In the recently published <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/webinar/445907/1051512" target="_blank">Gartner Magic Quadrant for DXPs</a>, it's evident that many of the same vendors are still dominating the leadership quadrant – and embracing a composable position. How will that impact evaluations and decision-making for CMS platforms, particularly as the composable CMSes become a more attractive play?
Maybe when the pollen clears, we'll see what's ahead. Stay tuned. 
<h2>About Zengenti</h2>
UK-based company, Zengenti, is the creator of Contensis. Contensis is a headless Content Management System (CMS) with an integrated deployment platform. Contensis provides a single place to create, maintain and deliver content. Its content modeling, authoring, and governance features help teams to create and keep on top of well-structured content. Open APIs make integrating with leading platforms and products easy to deliver immersive digital experiences for audiences. Contensis powers websites for world-leading organizations across various industries, such as higher education, local government, and the private sector.

Composable CMS Gains Traction as Google Search Volume Triples in Recent Months

Composable CMS as a keyword search term in Google

Containers are cool. Seriously. And you don't have to "nerd out" to say so. 
Think about it: not only have containers revolutionized the cloud computing landscape, but they're also powering the future of <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/" target="_blank">serverless technology</a> – which is ushering in a new era of digital transformation for modern apps.  
Of course, with containers comes the complexity of orchestration. That means (utter dreaded locution): <a href="https://kubernetes.io/" target="_blank">Kubernetes</a>.
For the uncontainerized, Kubernetes is a Dutch word that means "helmsman" or "pilot" in English. And true to its translation, Kubernetes requires an experienced DevOps captain to steer the ship through the wild waters of the cloud. 
Meanwhile, in the choppy seas of CMS, containers are making the course easier to navigate thanks to <a href="https://www.contensis.com/" target="_blank">Contensis,</a> a content management system owned by <a href="https://www.zengenti.com/" target="_blank">Zengenti</a>. The company recently announced a new container-forward solution called “Blocks,” which is designed to help web teams build and deliver <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/top-free-headless-cms-platforms/">headless websites</a>.
The Blocks, which use packages of code built as <a href="https://www.docker.com/" target="_blank">Docker</a> containers, aim to be easier and more efficient for both developers and content teams to use.
“Not many people are tackling the combined challenges of making it really easy to develop code, connect it to your content, and then deploy it,” said <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-chivers-34a36b11/" target="_blank">Richard Chivers</a>, CEO of Zengenti. “More often than not, enterprise-grade websites have multiple technologies co-existing, from payment gateways and search to rendering, all in different programming languages. With Blocks, we’ve made it easy to have each of these running independently in their own containers, potentially even managed by different teams, yet giving the site owner oversight and complete control to set new features live or roll-back functionality quickly without impacting the rest of the website.”
With the introduction of Blocks, users of the Contensis CMS can deploy new applications or services – without prior knowledge of Kubernetes or container orchestration. This makes it easier to push small changes or launch massive rollouts, depending on your specific needs.
“The launch of Blocks has addressed flexibility, convenience, and support head-on,” said Chivers.
<h2>Catching up with CEO Richard Chivers</h2>
Last October, CMS Critic caught up with Chivers for an <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/contensis-cms-looks-ahead-with-headless-focuses-on-performance-interview-with-ceo-richard-chivers/">interview</a>, where he hinted at the coming release of Blocks. When news broke of its launch, CMS Critic reached out to Chivers to learn more about the new solution and what it means for the future of Contensis. He outlined some key details in an insightful Q&amp;A below.
CMS Critic (CC): Blocks sounds like serverless, particularly around the DevOps mitigation and the autoscaling capabilities. Can you speak more about the DevOps posture? Is there AWS or Azure powering the underlying infrastructure? Or is this a proprietary cloud solution?
Richard Chivers (RC): With a simple Github action, you can push a block to the Contensis infrastructure, effectively bypassing any traditional deployment models typically associated with DevOps, meaning you can have continuous deployment and releases set-up and configured in minutes, without the need for deep DevOps expertise. Users can tailor the experience to their precise needs if required, but our typical workflows cover the 95th percentile out of the box. The underlying infrastructure for blocks is built on Kubernetes, and from a deployment perspective, our Kubernetes infrastructure is built on our proprietary cloud solution, which does include public cloud providers as required.
CC: What kinds of apps can be containerized and run as Blocks? Is this strictly for Contensis sites, or can any app be deployed and orchestrated in your cloud (without worrying about managing Kubernetes, CLIs, etc.)?
RC: Any app can be deployed and orchestrated using Blocks. You don’t need the block to use the Contensis content API. As a simple example, we have customers such as Revitive who run the order processing side of their e-commerce application inside Blocks today. This app reads and writes data to Oracle Netsuite as it happens, pulling orders at the point of sale from the Contensis API, but this could equally be any other platform or system.
CC: Who do you feel is the primary audience for this enhancement? Is this a play towards developers and Git-focused app builders? With the authoring and workflow upgrades, it seems that you’re tackling multiple targets in one announcement.
RC: It is fair to suggest that developers and Git-focused app builders are a key audience for Blocks, but we see huge benefits for all organizations and teams. Blocks allows real collaboration around deployments. Developers can focus on the delivery of new features, and product owners can release and deploy changes when it suits them, which really takes the sometimes awkward tension between developers and the business away. We see Blocks as being a perfect fit for agile teams.
CC: The rollback capability is very interesting. How does this compare to traditional blue-green deployments? Is that the underlying architecture? How simple is it to execute the change?
RC: The concepts of traditional blue-green deployments are very much at the heart of our strategy with rollback and releasing changes. We keep old Blocks running until new Blocks take over and vice-versa. The key difference is that we are putting these tools in the hands of business people with no need for any dev ops experience, rolling back is just the click of a button and is rolled out globally in seconds.
CC: At the recent <a href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff23" target="_blank">CMS Kickoff 2023 conference</a>, there were many headless platforms in attendance and several from Europe. Competition is heating up, and features are becoming more commoditized (as many vendors noted). What makes Blocks a truly competitive and transformative pivot for Contensis? What else might give you an edge in a crowded field in 2023, particularly when technology budgets are being reduced?
RC: Blocks simplifies deployment, which ultimately means fewer vendors and fewer experts to help manage, maintain, and support them, in turn, commoditizing, so to speak, the process of deploying and running websites or apps in a headless world. This ultimately allows companies to deliver their goals faster and save money. A customer can again go to a company to run their CMS and web deployments under one roof and one support contract, just like they used to in the days of the monolith CMS, but they can also benefit from all of the advantages a headless CMS brings to the table. In terms of what we are doing, our new canvas editor, due to be released over the next few months, is a completely different way of editing long-form content and something we have developed from the ground up. We think this will be pivotal in the future of Contensis and our continued drive toward the ultimate authoring experience for our users.
CMS Critic: The MACH Alliance was also at the conference, and they shared some ambitious plans and goals for this year. Does Contensis have any plans to join the best-of-breed consortium looking to elevate composable standards for the marketplace?
Chivers: This is absolutely something we would be interested in doing, we have been watching that space for some time, we have planned to open the conversation this year.
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
As cool as containers are, they present significant challenges from a DevOps perspective. Without a Git-focused team that understands the nature of repos and CI/CD pipelines, a container strategy isn't complete. This might sway organizations from embracing container-based tools or resources to power their apps. 
According to Chivers, Contensis Blocks effectively bypasses those DevOps barriers, providing continuous deployment and releases without the need for deep DevOps expertise. As he mentions in our Q&amp;A, Blocks covers most of the complexity out of the box, meaning that some expertise might still be required. It also sounds like there's a mix of both proprietary cloud technology running on essential public cloud services.
Contensis is clearly pushing the envelope (a kind of container, if you will). Blocks is a great expression of "cloud thinking" at its best and endeavors to streamline the use of containers to drive headless website development and deployment to the next level. 
If you can't "contain" your excitement, you can learn more at <a href="https://www.contensis.com/events/webinars/introducing-blocks" target="_blank">https://www.contensis.com/events/webinars/introducing-blocks.</a>
<h2>About Contensis</h2>
Contensis provides a single place to create, maintain and deliver your content. Its content modeling, authoring, and governance features help your teams to create and keep on top of well-structured content. A flexible set of APIs makes it easy to use your content in any way you like. Learn more at <a href="https://www.contensis.com/" target="_blank">https://www.contensis.com/.</a>

Contensis Launches Blocks, New Container-First Website Builder: Q&A with Richard Chivers

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If you’ve ever used <a href="https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/overview/" target="_blank">Google Lighthouse</a> (or a similar tool), you’ve probably experienced that sobering moment when the results surface… and you realize your website is slow.
Or, at the very least, slower than you thought.
Website performance testing is an elemental function. It’s core to delivering and maintaining a positive user experience for any business or organization. And speed is just one dimension: brands need to be concerned about quality, accessibility, and a host of other variables that impact UX.
Of course, the most important part of any website testing regimen is what you do with the results to optimize and improve – so future tests look better. 
As it turns out, your specific industry might reveal a lot about your sensitivity to customer needs relative to your website performance. That’s what the team at <a href="https://www.contensis.com/" target="_blank">Contensis</a>, an enterprise content management system, discovered in its recent analysis of all FTSE 100 and 250 homepages.
Contensis <a href="https://www.contensis.com/community/blog/ftse-website-performance" target="_blank">published its research</a> in the beginning of August, but we finally got a chance to sit down with <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-chivers-34a36b11/" target="_blank">Richard Chivers</a>, the key man behind the platform, to talk about the report's goals and what Contensis has been doing to help organizations build better-performing websites.
<h2>A legacy of CMS innovation </h2>
One might say that Rich Chivers is Contensis. During his 23 -year tenure at <a href="https://www.zengenti.com/" target="_blank">Zengenti</a>, the parent company of the CMS platform, he has served as head of development, CTO, and now CEO. Within that stretch, Chivers helped grow Contensis within the UK market where the company is based, with international customers in regions like Canada and Italy.
In his current role, Chivers is helping to guide the strategic direction of the core Contensis product as it enters its next chapter. “Seeing the rise of <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/top-free-headless-cms-platforms/">headless</a>, it’s massive,” he said. That’s underscored by the platform’s hybrid capabilities to serve both traditional and headless roles in an omnichannel strategy. The platform's focus on easy-to-use CMS features like content modeling with fast, adaptable, and reusable content types have put wind in its sails, allowing it to compete head-to-head with other modern platforms designed for content operations. 
We also discussed the nature of being composable as a modern digital experience tool. “The composable way of thinking is how we’ve been since the beginning,” he said. “Contensis has always tried to provide the basics to keep things simple. For 90% of cases, that works. But if they want something specialized, we recommend other resources to integrate with.”
Since 2001, Zengenti has been “crafting and refining” Contensis, providing a stream of improvements. Now, the Zengenti practice seems focused on providing expanded services that include hosting, design, UX, project management, and other web-related disciplines. They have a team of 30 people dedicated to custom development and implementation, and 40% of their customers choose Contensis for these optional services.
“We have agency partners, and we provide training and resources,” said Chivers. “We try to remain agnostic and let the customer design it [the project] how they want to.”
<h2>Big players, slow webpages: unpacking the FTSE 100 and 250 research</h2>
According to Chivers, Contensis has always focused on higher education, where accessibility is an essential baseline requirement. As he noted, they “know the space” and were building with accessibility in mind before much of the web and digital experience industry.
When asked about the research and what prompted it, Chivers said that they saw an opportunity to focus on a larger portion of the market and reveal what was happening around readability and content governance. This led to the testing engagement – which was quite revealing.
When a second can mean the difference between a buy and a bounce, it’s fair to say that performance measurement has become critical for every online business. But as Contensis discovered in the study, it’s companies in the media and publishing industry that are optimizing for success. Contensis provided a table of industry sectors and their respective Lighthouse scores, which illustrates how sectors like retail and travel – businesses that rely heavily on digital performance – are lagging. Interestingly, areas like manufacturing and logistics are doing very well, perhaps for a myriad of reasons such as fewer digital commerce requirements. 
Contensis used three dimensions of Google Lighthouse measurements – performance, accessibility, and homepage speed – to develop its scoring rubric. Chivers noted that the biggest eye-opener was around accessibility and the disparity between categories like travel and hospitality. With 22 percent of UK citizens living with some manner of disability, Chivers noted that improving accessibility would be a “win-win for the sector and their customers.”
<h2>Increased competition and economic challenges</h2>
As CMS becomes an increasingly commoditized layer of the digital stack, legacy platforms must find new ways to enhance their features while energizing their user base. As Chivers noted, much has changed across the CMS landscape in the last decade, particularly with how organizations select platforms.
“Everyone was handing the problem of a website to a monolith provider,” he said. “That’s how we used to be ten years ago. Where we [Contensis] sit today is that we offer a completely headless CMS with everything you would expect from the content side – and more.” This includes APIs, a deployment platform, hosting, and even the freedom for developers to build in any language they prefer.
“With Contensis, you have one house under which all things sit,” said Chivers. “You don’t have to have a big DevOps team to create CI flows – like a large organization using AWS and other tools that need three or four people just to deliver.”
As the enterprise software market faces the growing specter of a global economic recession, we asked Chivers how Contensis and the CMS category might be challenged by the headwinds. He took it in stride, noting that he successfully navigated his company through the previous recession and they're buoyed by customers in the public sector, including local government and higher education. These organizations, he noted, tend to "tighten procurement" versus eliminating it.
Despite the economic realities, Chivers says that Zengenti and Contensis are in a “position that many would love to have” with long-standing customers that continue to stay and evolve with the platform. The company is stable, self-funded, and currently not reliant on VC investment.
“[Our customers] have no reason to jump because we’re always ahead of where they want to be,” he said.
<h2>What’s ahead for Contensis?</h2>
We asked Chivers about any new product features on the Contensis roadmap that readers would be interested in learning about, and he immediately mentioned two things: first, some new advancements to the platform's blocks functionality, which should start releasing in the next month or two. The other is a new concept that will enable developers and site owners to release code and features faster – and roll back in a split second. Chivers described it as a more “agile-esque” approach that will impact coders while infusing more low-code capabilities. 
The gauntlet of personalization came up (as it always does), and Chivers said that it’s critical but needs to give customers the insight to see what users are doing on a site. This in turn provides more actionable information about what needs to be personalized. He also noted that personalization can be a struggle for organizations using multiple platforms, even if there are clear benefits.
“If we look at what everyone is trying to do with [personalization] right now, like Contentful and others that have been marketed heavily, there’s a place where composable solutions make sense – and others where they don’t.”
As Contensis looks ahead into the unknown of 2023, they have the unique advantage of hindsight. With over two decades of constant innovation and dedicated leadership, it’s no wonder their community of customers remains loyal and stalwart. It’s a rare position built on relationships – and one that continues to serve them well under Chiver’s leadership.
<h2>About Contensis</h2>
Contensis provides a single place to create, maintain and deliver your content. Its content modeling, authoring, and governance features help your teams to create and keep on top of well-structured content. A flexible set of APIs makes it easy to use your content in any way you like. Learn more at <a href="https://www.contensis.com/" target="_blank">https://www.contensis.com/ </a>

Contensis CMS Looks Ahead with Headless, Focuses on Performance: Interview with CEO Richard Chivers

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