Everything that is wrong with web development is perpetuated by the market leading CMSes

As I've said before, I'm not a web developer. I work for a small software house though, and as a result I end up doing a fair amount of web development. It's an experience that always  leaves me wanting to wash. With bleach.

The last couple of years, focus on virtualization has started to move from the big, heavyweight server virtualization platforms like ESX towards virtualization of services or microservices. This is finally starting to realise the promise of SOA in smaller, non-enterprise environments. Docker can run containers on virtualized platforms like AWS to massively simplify deployment and management.

But when you start trying to use this in reality you run into the problem of the CMS. Customers want CMSes - they want to pay for us to set up their site, but have the option to do little tweaks and edits themselves. Web development on the smaller scale end, providing simple sites that are updated a couple of times a month for businesses of up to 20 staff or so; and ecommerce sites for marginal 'run from a bedroom' businesses, small shopfronts etc., is totally dominated by 2 CMSes - Wordpress and Joomla*. There's not a lot to choose between them: both backend into MySQL, both are written in PHP, both have a huge estate of plugins.

The worst problem with web development is that so much of it happens in production. We bemoan 'bedroom programmers' and the amateurish habits of a lot of web developers, but in reality this happens because of the CMS. The CMS stores page content in the database. When you are developing a site for a customer the 'product' you are producing is scattered across template files and database entries. Those database entries are stored on a database engine along with a load of other products. Yes, you can dig them out with database queries, but it's still a mess of jumbled string with no sense of encapsulation. This makes staged deployment impractical**.

This is why everything happens in production, because it's all but impossible to have proper staging and controlled release. All the amateurish shit that happens in web development logically flows from that one place.

Is there an answer? Probably. CMSes backending into MySQL are the source of the problem, especially at this level. Serving from files is faster, more reliable, more scale appropriate and makes it possible to use proper versioning tools. It's only inertia and the availability of plugins that keeps us using them. My favoured approach would be something like Grav running in a docker container, and since Grav has a shopping cart it should be straightforword to do.

Time to do some experimenting.

https://getgrav.org/

https://gravshoppingcart.com/

* Drupal is a bit bigger scale, but suffers from exactly the same problems.
** Yes yes, I know. Vagrant, Ansible, Puppet etc. Very powerful tools that, in this context, do a great job of making up for the design shortcoming that  MySQL backed CMSes don't encapsulate properly.