As a result, content management systems are getting more and more complex every year. The industry has steadily crept outward from the clearly defined core of 15 years ago. We’ve already discussed the drift from content into community management, and now we have systems managing social media, offering powerful marketing suites, and even trying to act as general application development frameworks.
The price we pay for this is complexity. The list of features you’re going to ignore and try to find ways to disable can easily be longer than the list of features you’re actually going to use.
As systems become more complex, they tend to become more generic. Developers working on any system for too long drift into larger architectural concepts and frameworks. They become what Joel Spolsky has called “architecture astronauts:”