alt Hacker News> But once you’re dealing with multiple users (tens or hundreds) it’s a different problem. How confident are you writing auth and password reset flows? How sure are you that the AI got it right? How solid is your approach to roles and permissions? Are you implementing 2FA? Supporting drafts, scheduled publishing, editorial workflows? Now you are also tech support writing the infrastructure as issues come in.
And that's only the start of where it gets complicated
- Ingesting data from 3rd party systems
- Translating content to other languages
- Front end user auth and preferences
- Personalized content
- A/B testing
- Multiple sites in the same CMS, sharing the same content
The list of things that add on to make a cms (and the sites it is used to create) more complicated is enormous.
I built a production forum from scratch with thousands of real users.
For years I thought of doing it. Can’t be that hard. You can imagine how every component would work. You just need a few tables, right?
But it turns out a polished forum that people want to spend time on has infinite polish. Every feature explodes into a fractal of micro polish. You could spend your whole life improving it and handling rough edges and making it nicer to use.
The WYSIWYG editor being a good example. You could work on just that full-time and never run out of things to do. Or the daylight between a MVP notification system and a mature one that sends PM/email notifs, tracks high water marks, lets users mute certain threads, infinite polish.