Building a Simple CMS
October 15, 2026
I’ve been around content management systems (CMS) for a long time.
I wrote a Content Management System in PHP for a project I did for UCSF researchers before Wordpress, Drupal, Squarespace or Wix existed. The researchers logged in, wrote their articles and then clicked a button to publish to the web. Seemed like magic at the time for non-programmers to publish to the web.
Soon after, I worked for Pantheon. I sold a platform for developers building CMS systems and web applications based on Drupal and Wordpress. I joined as their first sales person. 10th employee when the company had $0 in revenue. I left Pantheon having a successful 5 year run in sales and managing a sales team. I helped grow Pantheon from $0 to $50M in annual recurring revenue.
Today, I wanted to build a CMS again. But building software has been revolutionized in the past year thanks to agentic AI and the sophistication of the language models for coding.
The CMS I wrote for UCSF took me months to complete. Today I built a CMS from scratch and it took me half an hour.
Today I built jeffpflueger.com as the front end of a simple CMS system using Google Docs.
How it works:
- I make or edit content entries in Google docs.
- I have an Apps Script that is now a button that lives next to every google doc that I write called Blog Publisher
- When I click the Publish the script converts the google doc to HTML, commits the content to github (version control), and publishes it on GitHub pages as a webpage.
The amazing part of all of this, is that just a year ago, an open source platform called OpenClaw was the defacto local AI agent that can orchestrate complex workflows like what I did today. But just a year later, Claude Desktop is so much more.
Claude completed so much of the work that a developer would typically have to manage for this project by interacting with my browser (like creating a Apps Script, pasting the code into the web interface, testing, doing visual regression testing of the published web page to ensure that the output was what was intended, pushing and pulling from GitHub. Some of this I instructed Claude to do. Much of it, Claude did because it was the right thing to do without any instruction from me. That’s agentic AI
Just have to take a moment and reflect on how FAST the world is moving right now. And how powerful these tools are becoming.
30 minutes. An entire simple Content management system that might have taken less time to build than for me to write this first post to my new CMS.
Now let me click Publish.
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