The site had a CMS. It worked, in the sense that content could be changed. It just could not be changed by the people who wanted to change it, which meant every gallery update queued behind someone technical.
Content that requires a developer does not get updated. Not because anyone refuses, but because asking is friction, and friction applied to a low-urgency task means the task never happens. The site goes stale for reasons that have nothing to do with the site.
I took the comparison seriously. People expect the ease of Framer or Wix because they have used them. Rather than treating that as an unreasonable benchmark, I aimed at it: realtime preview, direct manipulation, and media handling that does not require thinking about formats or sizes.
A CMS designed around the editor rather than the content model: realtime preview, simplified gallery management, easier video uploads, and editing scoped to the whole site rather than a content island.
Not "build a better CMS". A named person needs to add a gallery on a Tuesday without messaging anyone. That is concrete enough to design against and concrete enough to know when you are done — which is rare, and worth defending against the features that will try to attach themselves to it.
What it runs on