Hi, I'm Butsch (don't laugh!). It's an abbreviation of my family name, invented by my maths teacher in 5th grade. Ever since I've been called "Butsch". If the first thing that pops up in your mind is "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid", you're probably my age. If it's "Pulp Fiction" you're probably a good deal younger than me (still a great movie, though).
Now that you roughly know my age, you won't be surprised that I started coding back in 1984 - in Basic and machine code on an 8-bit computer (I still know what a bitshift is).
I started web development in the mid-90s - first HTML (CSS didn't exist back then, can you imagine?). Then Perl, because we needed dynamic functions. Soon I got into Java and then PHP and have been a web developer ever since.
In the 90s I also worked for a university institute developing simulations in the social sciences and worked with early AI techniques like neural networks and expert systems but also cellular automata, Boolean networks, and genetic algorithms.
So I have been involved in web development for almost 35 years.
In the early 2000s I worked for different web agencies, among them one of the first TYPO3 agencies as well as one of the biggest German internet agencies. I then founded my own agency together with some colleagues, which lasted 10 years. That was the time I started looking into content strategy and headless CMS. For my blog I interviewed Sascha Konietzke from Contentful (you can still read the article here) and he showed me around in his office in Berlin - a nice guy and totally burning for his topic, which sparked my interest as well, I guess.
At that time I also organised the "Content Commerce Conference" where I invited Content Strategy Superstar Karen McGrane to hold a workshop on content strategy. Today she's Senior Director at Contentful but was on the advisory board back then.
Ever since I've been watching the headless CMS market - and have tried a bunch of them. Two things always have bothered me:
- Why the heck does a headless CMS have to be a SaaS/cloud thingy and thus be unnecessarily expensive?
- And why do you have to click through a backend for hours on end just to design a content model?
So I came up with the idea: Let's pretend it's 1998 again and we have our own infrastructure. What if we started with the assumption that not everyone has a big budget? What's the simplest infrastructure we could build for? Shared hosting. How would I design a headless CMS for that?
And what if, instead of clicking through a backend (which is a daunting task, I can tell you), we simply used something like UML?
That was when LessHeadCMS was born: design a UML diagram (your content model), put it in an easily parsable format (like PlantUML), and your CMS-to-be parses the UML, sets up the database accordingly, and from that derives the UI.
You see: headless CMS does not have to be expensive and complicated.
P.S.: Apart from being a web developer, I am also a trained fascia therapist and was the singer in the RÄMOUNS.
P.P.S.: Before I forget it - I am also the author of the WordPress-Plugin "El Butschitos HTML Publisher" with which you can generate static HTML-Files from your WordPress content with an HTML YOU control.