Chris Bryce: All right, we are live on LinkedIn. Thanks everyone who's taking a moment out of their lunch hour to join us, those of you on the East Coast, morning time from my friends on the West Coast. Welcome to Beyond the CMS, episode 43 now, and thanks to everyone who's tuned in, live and through our library of assets on places where you'll find podcasts and on YouTube as well. So the whole idea here is really down to earth, to chat about the current and future state of content and content systems and tooling that makes up your overall content operations. I'm Chris Bryce, I'm the founder of Dotfusion, also kind of a content operations architect fellow. And each week we have an amazing special guest to help share insights and just ideas around what's next as far as content goes, and the tooling behind it all. Feel free to ask us questions if our tools are working right, your questions on LinkedIn will actually show up in the interface here, and we'll do our best to answer them. And if you're watching this in the future, leave comments below whatever platform you're using and we'll follow up right away. So without further ado, super special guest Preston So. Thank you for joining us from React Bricks and Decoupled Days, and a whole bunch of wonderful experiences you've had in the past. Maybe just introduce yourself and we will get a great chat going.

Preston So: Sure, Chris. Hey, thanks so much and thanks to everybody who's watching. It's a real pleasure to be here on Beyond the CMS. My name is Preston So, I am Chief Commercial Officer at React Bricks and also the founder of Decoupled Days, which is a nonprofit conference on all things AI, CMS, all things headless CMS, which will happen in August in Montreal. And I've been in the CMS industry for about 22 years, which I'm pretty sure is longer than Chris, you've been alive. So some would say you and I have both been in the space for a little too long at this point. But yeah, it's been a great journey. I've worked at places like Oracle and Acquia, working on Drupal, working on CMSs written in Java and PHP, and now of course in JavaScript with React Bricks. So, real pleasure to be here today.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, right on. Well, you said the word, and this is about as scripted as we get, but I mentioned that we might get a definition from you around how do you define headless as it applies to content management and websites.

Preston So: Absolutely, absolutely. And it's interesting because headless is a term that I think, as a preface, originated from the concept of a headless interface, basically a text only or non-visual interface. And that really extended its way into content in a way that I think is very compelling, right? The idea that, hey, what we're really talking about is structured content, and operating on that content in ways that make sense for wherever that content might end up. Now, I've been writing and reading and speaking for many years, including in all of my books, about how important it is to look at beyond the website. I know this is called Beyond the CMS, but also I think beyond the web is important as well. Internet of Things, virtual reality, augmented reality, I wish that we were a little bit more in that direction. Unfortunately, the Metaverse is kind of over at this point, but I do think that singular definition that comes up time and time again, right, from folks who are the big vendors in the market and also the smaller players, is, well, hey, if we can separate and enforce a separation of concerns between our content and where it lives, and also our code and our developer work and where that lives, then we can actually accelerate the way that both can work in an increasingly unsettled marketing landscape. So, for me, headless from a technical definition is really about, hey, this comes from the era of graphical user interfaces, and when they first started, some of the oldest, for example, browsers that were in existence were text only browsers that had no ability to display HTML in a way that we would recognize it today. But I do think today it's really about, well, let's make sure to keep these two concerns very separate. Let's make sure to keep the developers working as fast as they can, working as efficiently as they can, as effectively as they can. And also let's make sure that our content editors and designers also can do the same. And so I think that headless has evolved over the years. There's also that endless debate about what is the difference between headless and decoupled. But in a nutshell, that's probably how I would define it, and probably the same thing that you've heard dozens of times already before, too.

Chris Bryce: Awesome explanation. I was actually just on a call earlier today where I was just sharing that I kind of am the bridge to a marketing decision maker and the technical team. So our customers are in the enterprise space, and it's usually a CMO, VP of marketing. That is a really important role in the decision on the content platform, but it's gotten increasingly technical, and the names to them aren't as important as the value they deliver. Whether it's a monolith DXP or headless, they're coming to me to translate the value to the authors, to the infrastructure and their compliance teams. Now it's getting a little bit more complicated. And you've got a product that you are now overseeing, React Bricks. Where does that fall into the CMS ecosystem?

Preston So: Absolutely. It's a great question, and I find it really interesting that you mention the notion of value. Right? And one thing I wanna say before I get to talking about React Bricks, which I can do all day, is right now what we're seeing in the industry, I think, is a shift back to some of the ways in which we built at the very beginning. I think a lot of folks are getting a little bit tired of, let's say, both sides of the market, where you have a lot of the monolithic DXP traditional players saying, hey, you gotta pay for this very large subscription that's gonna be six or seven figures every year, and you're gonna get a bunch of stuff that you might not actually ever use, like a customer data platform or marketing automation tools or other things that maybe your organization isn't quite at that level of maturity, or doesn't want to use some of those tools. On the flip side, however, I think that the composable segment of the market, where a lot of the headless players are today, have sort of overcompensated for, okay, we wanna really separate everything out, now you gotta pay for what you actually use. You gotta pay to play, you gotta piece together your own architecture, your own solutions. But the issue with that, of course, then becomes a lot of the binds that come together between the people who are working at this center of collaboration, which is the CMS. One of the things that you've heard me say before as well, Chris, is I think the CMS is very unique in the software market, because it really focuses on not just one persona, not just, let's say, a salesperson who uses Salesforce, or an email marketer who uses HubSpot, but it really focuses on a variety of different people that need to all come together and use the CMS. So I do think the CMS as a center of all of this is still very important, the center in this sort of hive mind of collaboration, especially with AI becoming more mainstream. And I wanna talk about that too. But when we talk about value, I think it's really, what is it that actually solves the immediate problems that are sitting in front of the person who needs to build a website today? And when it comes to developers, that's a very different calculus from what it was three years ago. For content editors, also a very different calculus from what it was three years ago. So React Bricks is sort of an answer to this question. We call ourselves a design system native CMS. And what we mean by that is, obviously every single CMS that talks about agentic CMS or talks about AI powered CMS or has AI features, a lot of the things that they're solving for are now table stakes, are now solved problems. Chief amongst those would be text and asset generation, some of these generated summary fields or SEO fields or metadata fields that we see very often, alternative text as well for accessibility. But I do think that where a lot of folks are still seeing a lot of friction, and this was also borne out by something that a friend of mine, Steve Sewell, posted, he's the founder of Builder.io, just recently, talking about the fact that where AI is shifting the balance is that folks are not really having a big issue with the actual code anymore. It's now all of the areas in which they have to interface with other folks, designers, content editors, marketers, auditors, compliance folks as well. That makes things very, very challenging today. So one of the things that React Bricks does is a couple of things. The first thing is it's built on a completely modern developer stack. That is, the way I describe it, is it's very ergonomic for developers, which means that if you're a developer working with the most, let's say, advanced React frameworks that are now cutting edge, like Astro or Next.js. You're also working with AI tools, right? So you might have some Claude Code skills. You've got a lot of ways you like to work, agentically, potentially. You've also got a lot of things you want to do with generating code, and also just letting an agent have at it and see what it comes up with. One of the things that we argue at React Bricks is that, well, honestly, what this is doing is it's shifting the balance left. And what I mean by that is, well, as we've seen a lot of the AI boosters today talk a lot about the fact that, hey, a product manager or a designer can now put together, let's say, a really quick prototype or a really great website, that is really honestly ready for prime time within no more than let's say half an hour, even less. But I think one of the things that was interesting is I caught up, just a couple weeks ago, with a former colleague of mine who cited some data saying that, basically, what is happening now is that, yeah, once you get up to that one million dollar number in ARR, or one to ten million dollar range, things get a little bit more complicated, because, okay, sure, you can vibe code your way into a static website that you're not gonna touch. You just revamp it every single time, you just go from top to bottom, go back to the drawing board every single time. But once you hit those revenue numbers, once you hit that audience where you gotta start having some stability and a bit more of that sense of, okay, this is a tangible thing that we can actually rely on as a product, that's where things change quite a bit. And that's where you do need to think about how do we actually foster these linkages between the designer and the developer and the content editor, in ways that actually make sense for all of them, in conjunction, obviously, with all of the agents now operating at all of those junctures as well. So when we talk about a design system native CMS, we're really talking about moving the middle ground away from, let's say, what was normally just, hey, here's a bunch of data, here's a bunch of content, over to, well, it's not just content that matters, it's also the design system that matters. And obviously one of the issues with vibe coding, and one of the issues with a lot of these AI generated websites like Google Stitch, with their big announcement recently, is that, sure, okay, you create a bunch of static HTML, or it can even, with a little bit of work, you can turn that into something that is very easy to use through AI for a developer. But what happens when you need to add in some new complexity, or add in something else that also still respects that design system? And that's where a lot of these solutions start to fall flat. Because you've got this really great design that was generated, let's say, two weeks ago, two months ago, but things might have changed since then. And you might want to be honoring a different design system, or honoring a different approach to your content strategy, that really isn't reflected in that corpus of what the AI is actually looking at when it generates these things. So, all in all, I think what is interesting is that we've seen up until now, CMSs really focused on, hey, generate this text field, generate this image, generate this video. And we are seeing now, of course, that that's all a solved problem. But now I think one of the biggest challenges is, especially as, and this is something that really did worry me as AI started to take the CMS world by storm, is, well, is there an existential crisis near? I pronounced the end of the monolithic CMS era officially, right? Like it's completely over, a few years back. But now, when it seems like, right, you've got CMSs that are now emerging, that are AI generated themselves, or potentially can argue for why do we need a CMS in the first place? I do think that the clean sheet approach that now is happening with vibe coding, where you have to start from that sort of clean sheet every time, or from that memory bank that the AI has on you, it becomes a lot trickier to say, how can we actually marry all of these things together in a way that allows for people to not just completely revamp their work every time, but incrementally improve it and enrich it.

Chris Bryce: Great points. And I think your enthusiasm and acknowledgement that vibe coding is just kind of a part of the way we do things now is kind of refreshing, because I've always thought that this AI business is amazing, and I do hang out with a lot of developer friends who maybe just didn't wanna believe this was happening. But it's great that your system acknowledges that these are some of the worker bees that are gonna be participating in the production of web stuff or digital content. And from the existential perspective, funny you mentioned that, it was the same chat I was having a bit earlier with a pal from Squiz actually, and they're like, what the heck is going on right here? They're kind of a DXP, and I deal a lot with headless, Dotfusion basically just builds on headless stuff. We're like, what is really going on? We're like, well, CMS is really our publishing machines, they pushed the content that you probably made somewhere else to a static HTML file, or whatever was required for it to load up in a browser. It was really a publishing interface, it wasn't a lot of management of content going on in the content management system. So we're trying to think about how do you add value in CMS tooling for the next gen. And one of the ideas we were playing with is, how does a CMS become a content operations control center? There's more to it than publishing, and I think you're onto something with kind of design acknowledgement coming into the system. There's a build and publish that still goes on, using AI in the right way to kind of add some velocity to content in general, but, what is your platform, what's a great way to phrase this, how do you pitch the platform to a marketer?

Preston So: Yeah, that's a great question. And I'm glad you're segueing into that, because I think everything I said just now is also very much for the architect audience, but not necessarily for the marketing audience. I mean, lately in the CMS world, what you've seen emerge is this trend toward what we call visual headless CMS. And this is, hey, let's keep the really great things about this developer experience that we've now cultivated, which is focused on TypeScript, focused on whatever front end technology you want to use, whatever you're most comfortable with. I mean, these days it does seem like React is a favorite, but that still lets your marketers have full, but also respects the constraints of a design system and brand guidelines and all the things that we know a lot of organizations care about. And I think this is one of the big things that we saw with the emergence of tools like Dreamweaver back in the day, tools like FrontPage. It's, okay, well, you can do whatever you want, right, as somebody who has full control over the visual dimension of a website. But does that really actually help you remain loyal to some of the things that, let's say, the analog marketing team, not the digital marketing team, but the analog marketing team, might have some thoughts about, like the logo, like the color schemes, and that sort of thing. So, what I will say is that one thing that we really focus on is, I believe, and we believe, that a CMS these days, because it's that nexus of collaboration between all of these folks, it needs to have an awareness, and a very deep and intimate awareness of not just the content, and not just the data, but also the visual rendering of that data and that content. And that means basically a visually editable website fully in the context of the CMS. We're seeing more and more CMSs go in this direction. I think the prior headless approach was to say, well, that was just a misguided architectural decision, that was a misguided move on the part of monolithic CMSs. But now they're noticing that, now that you've got a lot more budgets that are shifting over to the marketing side, you've got a lot more chief marketing officers that are very concerned about the ways in which they're using technology in terms of MarTech. You're seeing this sort of, not backlash, but certainly a pendulum swing back into the direction of saying, hey, we used to have these visually editable tools that allowed us to drag and drop components onto the page and sort of edit in place without having to go to a completely separate preview screen or preview browser. Why can't we have that today? And so, I think one of the challenges has been, and this is I think where a lot of the newer headless CMSs are focusing a lot of their investment, is, well, how do we make sure that we still keep those linkages back to tools like Figma, or tools that allow us to basically implement a CMS within the context of a design system. And so I think you're seeing lots of innovation both in the direction that you mentioned, Chris. Because I was just at Triple Con, Chicago, a couple weeks ago, where they announced a release candidate for what they call the context control center, which is basically a way to subcontract context out, and make it very clear what each prompt that's indicated for a certain context is gonna actually be doing. I do think that the context that we're seeing now is not just relevant to the actual content corpus that's in your database, it's now really everything that involves anything that touches the website. And I can see a future, for example, arguably as well, where I do believe, and I've long believed, that some of the same tools that we're seeing for visual headless CMS and these visual editors that are making these JavaScript driven or headless websites a lot easier to use and a lot easier to manage, are things that are gonna really spill over into other experiences as well. And some of these other interfaces that we've seen emerge. But I do think that one of the things that is still a concern, and I don't think that the CMS market has really a hundred percent solved it in a way that's a hundred percent seamless and graceful, and that's really where we're working towards with React Bricks, is, is there a way for that through line to be maintained? Because headless severed that through line, monolithic also severed that through line. Headless severed the through line for people that are designers, or people who are marketers, folks who are developers. They saw that through line severed when the CMSs just didn't really evolve in the monolithic era with how they built on the CMS. But now I think there's gonna need to be a really, really stable through line, because that's the layer in which agentic AI has to operate, right? That's the awareness that it has to have. The context it has to have is this larger media of, hey, here's the design system, here's the content, here's the code, and it all has to work together in a way that makes sense for marketers as well. And that's no small feat.

Chris Bryce: Awesome, man. It's amazing how fast time flies when we're really rolling. There's a few things I wanted to make sure to cover. We may go a little bit long if that's good for you, if you don't have something on the stove ready. I did want to give you an opportunity to maybe demo what you've got there too.

Preston So: Sure.

Chris Bryce: But just before that, you had mentioned earlier that you've been running Decoupled Days for a couple years now, not sure how long that's been going, but I'm really enthusiastic about making sure that we promote that, and that you have a chance to tell folks a little bit more about that.

Preston So: Absolutely, absolutely. So, I do wanna share that we are in our ninth year, which is an eternity in software years. I mean, having a conference go for nine years is a very tall order, especially after everything that's been going on. But Decoupled Days, we call ourselves the modern open source web developer conference. We're primarily a conference for architects and developers and business people who are interested in all things related to not just content systems and commerce systems, but also emerging technologies and AI and agentic approaches and content operations and content governance as well, content strategy. So, we're gonna be on August 6th and 7th in Montreal at Montreal Cowork, which is a venue located in Le Plateau-Mont-Royal. And it's gonna be a great time. We've actually had to get more space, which is the first time that we've had to do this in a while. So, August in Montreal is obviously very beautiful, it's my favorite time of year to go, although I do like the dead of winter as well. And yeah, it's gonna be a great time. I guess this is a good time to share, actually, Dotfusion is a sponsor of our event this year, we're very, very grateful to have Dotfusion's support. And I believe Chris will also be speaking, so you'll have to come and see him at our conference as well. And it's also back to back with another event that's near and dear to my heart, which I've attended for several years, which is CMS Connect, so it's shaping up to be sort of a big CMS tech week in Montreal that week. But yeah, tickets are available, only 35 Canadian right now, early bird prices are still open until at least until we announce our sessions, which should be in the next week or two. And, yeah, we've been going for nine years, and hopefully for nine more.

Chris Bryce: Awesome, awesome. Really great to support what you're doing, and looking forward to seeing you in Montreal. Cool, well, hey, if you're open to it, I'd love to learn more visually about React Bricks. Maybe take us on a bit of a tour.

Preston So: Absolutely. So I'm gonna keep this really quick, because I think everyone who's in the CMS world knows what a CMS looks like and how it works. But let me just share my screen here. And I've got it open already, so should be seeing my screen pop up now. Okay, and I think I gotta do something. Here we go.

Chris Bryce: Amazing. Perfect.

Preston So: So this is the React Bricks CMS. Very, very simply put, it's got a very clean interface, and it's got a very, I would say, sterile interface. And the reason for that is because the focus is all on the visual editing. Obviously, a lot of CMSs have this sidebar over here where you can edit certain things. Now, one of the things I wanna note is for the developers who are watching this right now, is everything in React Bricks is essentially configurable as a React component prop. So if you've got a library of components that you're using to manage your site, essentially everything that you can imagine that's tied to the design system that you're working with, or tied to whatever design tokens you wanna work with, or whatever CSS variables you want to use, those are all things that can be controlled, and actually exposed to the content editor within the sidebar. And this is a really important concern for not only marketing organizations that want to keep their design systems on lock, but also for developers that really want to be very careful about what they actually show to the users of the CMS. Very, very normal CMS interface. What I wanna do though is, instead of showing you a bunch of stuff that you've already seen before, I wanna actually go straight into AI generation, right? Because one of the things that I think has been noticeable over the last few years is a lot of CMSs are now playing with not just the individual text field generation or individual image generation, but actually generating entire pages. But one of the problems that I think we've noticed is, for some of the demos I've seen recently, these prompts get very verbose. These prompts require a lot of information put in. The prompts become essentially like 500 word essays, which I know nobody in the current generation, myself included, is capable of actually writing these days in a focused fashion. But one thing I want to note here is that everything that you see on the right side here, so let's talk about, for example, let me actually go back to the prior page so I can show you some stuff. So, obviously you can edit live here. You can also change basically anything that is in the CMS's visual display, with the ties going all the way back to the design system. Notice how this color scheme is obviously not something that is a full palette, it's the brand colors that we've defined as an organization. But what I wanna do now, instead of showing you just the normal stuff that I think every CMS has, is we've got a new AI set of features that we're launching, and this is happening this month. I believe, not only are we launching an MCP server for developers, but we're also launching a fully stable version of essentially a way to generate fully generated landing pages that respect your design system, respect the code that you've written as well, and also allow for any sort of content to be generated all within the confines of this design system.

Chris Bryce: Very cool.

Preston So: What I'm gonna do is, let's just hypothetically say that the React Bricks company has decided to relocate from Baral, Italy, which is where our headquarters is, to Mississauga, right? But we're not gonna say Mississauga, we're gonna say Toronto, because nobody likes to say they're from Mississauga.

Chris Bryce: So, yeah, that's a questionable move.

Preston So: Well, hopefully Mississauga friends, hopefully I didn't offend anyone there, but if so, I will revisit Mississauga soon, so I'm excited to have my opinion changed. Create a new page about the new React Bricks headquarters in Toronto. So if I just put this prompt in, what'll happen is, and this is obviously a draft page where I've already generated some previous content that was about, hey, here's some tourist information about New York City for the React Bricks headquarters in New York. How a company can have multiple headquarters, that's a philosophical discussion. But, as this goes, I also wanna note that our AI features will also include a Claude Code skill, that will allow for essentially a lot of different things to happen if you've got, for example, a React application that you want to convert into a React Bricks compliant, or faithful, app, you can do that very, very quickly. But, needless to say, here are the key things I wanna note here, right? All of this content was written by AI, none of this was written by myself, because I wouldn't be able to write so eloquently about Toronto. But I think one of the things that is really important is all of this is editable. So I can just come in here and, we're talking about accessibility for people, for mobility aid users, let's say, thriving tech ecosystem, especially in Mississauga. But the thing that I wanna note here is, let's just say, for example, that I've got my design system respected here. Right? But this is the key thing that is really missing from a lot of the demos that are in AI, is the ability to actually come in here. Oh, and looks like this, oh, looks like this demo is broken today. If I go to another icon, I can probably change it. So clearly there's still some work being done there to stabilize. Let me just see if this one looks... Yeah, no. Anyways, live demo risk. That would change the icon, it would change the icon to whatever you want within the icon library.

Chris Bryce: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Preston So: So, in any case, that is just a quick demo. Obviously the other things that are really kind of standard for CMSs is, you've got a lot of very, I would say, baseline features, email marketing is something that we've just launched recently. But essentially anything you can imagine, if you wanna also do things like integrate with a commerce system, you've got the ability to really have a very flexible content model. We've also got multilingual support, and all sorts of other things. So.

Chris Bryce: Very cool. In time, I'll stop right there, but, oh man, I just got so many more questions for you now, but thank you for sharing. Maybe we could dedicate some time for a full on demo.

Preston So: Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Bryce: Which is a great segue, for folks that are interested, that are listening to us now, that are listening to us later, how do you onboard the product? Do you get a sandbox for a while? Like, what's kind of the process of moving someone from never having heard of you before to kind of getting their hands in there?

Preston So: Yeah, absolutely. Well, the easiest way is just to sign up for a React Bricks account. You get access to a sandbox site right away, right then and there. We've got a lot of developers using our product, and a lot of big names like The Weather Channel, La Banque Postale, which is a financial institution in Europe as well. So, but that's the easiest way. What'll happen is actually you'll hear from my colleague most likely, or from one of my colleagues. But, Mitch is our head of customer success.

Chris Bryce: Amazing.

Preston So: Amazing guy. And we will probably reach out, be the one to reach out potentially as well, about getting you started. I will say, as somebody who normally takes a look at the documentation very quickly, the React Bricks documentation is fantastic, and it has everything you need, whether you're a designer or developer or marketer just getting started for the first time. It can get you going right away. So reactbricks.com. And you can also find a bunch of our previous videos. We're probably gonna have another workshop here soon, our last workshop was a huge success. Got a lot of people excited about some of the stuff that we're doing with both the MCP server and also with Claude Code. So, yeah.

Chris Bryce: Cool. I'm gonna be signing up and playing over the weekend and doing some tutorials. I love kind of sending Claude out to create things.

Preston So: Absolutely.

Chris Bryce: Well, hey man, super great to have you on the show, I really appreciate it. And maybe just so everyone is reminded again, Decoupled Days is coming up in August, also reach out to Preston for more information around that, everything headless, decoupled and interesting. So super great. So thanks everyone who is tuning in now or into the future, for another great episode, number 43. We're gonna sign off now, hope everyone got some great value out of this, and Preston, we'll see you in a few months.

Preston So: Hey, thanks so much, Chris. It's always a pleasure. I know we can always talk for hours, this was way too short.

Chris Bryce: No worries.

Preston So: But yeah, decoupleddays.com, give us a look, and you'll see our content come out soon. We just announced our keynote speaker. reactbricks.com, check it out. And also, Preston So, if you wanna follow some of my work, and see what I've been up to.

Chris Bryce: Amazing. I'm gonna hit some buttons and the stream, stay on with me here for a sec.