Together with our colleagues from dkd, I attended the first European CMS Summit in Frankfurt on May 13, 2025. CMS enthusiasts, vendors and agencies met in Frankfurt's TechQuartier to discuss the latest trends in the CMS market. Whether open source or closed source, the requirements for a modern CMS are growing, as are the demands of customers in the age of AI.

The CMS Summit took place in this format for the first time in Europe and offered a very good platform to discuss not only local trends but also global challenges and to gain insights into how CMS such as WordPress or Drupal deal with the current challenges in exciting presentations.

Be it WordPress with the current legal disputes, which are still ongoing and are not easy for the agencies concerned, or Drupal, which is undergoing organizational restructuring in Europe, among other things.

In addition to the very interesting experience reports from customers with their CMS, e.g. DB and Dr. Oetker, I found two topics particularly interesting.

Firstly, it was of course (how could it be otherwise) about AI and how the various CMSs deal with the new requirements of their customers. Secondly, the topic of AI Experience, which was very much about trust, transparency and the user-centered use of AI in customer projects in order to experience real added value through AI and ultimately achieve an increase in productivity. Understanding workflows and processes is becoming even more important here than it was previously in the projects.

The second topic that I found very interesting was the sustainable development of web applications, which was presented very well by Thorsten Jonas (Sustainable UX Network). In a very good presentation, he talked about the responsibility for sustainability in development and how even small things such as the right choice of image formats can have a huge impact on resource consumption when running web applications.

For example, .jpg is still used in many projects, although formats such as .png or .webp can significantly reduce the resource consumption of a web application. It's often small things that can make a big difference and I wasn't aware of this to this extent until now. In any case, this is a topic that I will take back to our development teams.

At the end of the day, some CMS projects were able to present themselves again in a 6-minute pitch format ("CMS Idol"), it was very exciting to see what is currently happening on the market and where the individual CMS see their advantages. A very good format in my opinion.

Thanks also go to Søren, Olivier and Emina from dkd for taking me to the conference and for the good discussions, as well as a very good presentation by Søren!

I would be very happy to continue this series of events for international exchange in the CMS community in 2026. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Janus Boye (Boye & Company).