I’m very interested in the ideas that may come out of this discussion, so please don’t take my post as some type of final organizational position - these are thoughts and thoughts often change. I really think we’re at a time where there’s more questions than clear answers for everyone.
I agree with Katalysis that AI changes everything. Not just how we create content, but how we discover it, structure it, and turn it into something useful. Like JohntheFish, I’m not impressed with “auto-generate my blog posts” gimmicks. But using AI as a collaborator? It’s been transformative. Brainstorming, outlining, reworking tone, cleaning up clarity - it’s like having a brutally efficient junior editor who never sleeps. Case in point; this post started as twice as long and half as clear. Thanks ChatGPT. 
The metaphor I keep using is: take a set of power tools back to a furniture shop in the 1600s. A skilled craftsman would panic as they saw how fast I could cut wood. The reality is, we still use hand tools in shops today. Sure, fewer people are employed in “sanding” - but sanding is a shit job. Power tools didn’t kill furniture design. You still need taste, judgment, and vision to make anything worth keeping. AI is the same.
So no, I’m not racing to add a “generate content” button to Concrete CMS. That’s table stakes, CKEditor already offers one. Everyone’s doing it. I’d welcome marketplace submissions for it, but I’m not spending my time making it easier to publish more vanilla sludge. Great content is still a human-led process. AI just helps you get there faster.
Structured data and semantic context are very interesting. If there’s something more we can be doing in the core to make the content people are creating (sometimes with AI) easier for AI to consume, we should absolutely be moving on that. Katalysis is right that we have the ability to make deep changes pretty quickly for an open source project because the core delivers so much consistently. I can’t help but to admit we JUST added open graph tags to the core in a recent version update, we should have done that ages ago. If there are new standards we can embrace in a similar vein of accurately describing and organizing content in ways that AI crawlers will like, we should be discussing that and doing it faster than we’ve moved in the past. I’d love to get some consensus from the community on how we can create better meta data for AI gracefully spider Concrete sites.
Changing the fundamental database structure of Concrete because we’re interested in vector search seems like a big shift. It’s also not clear to me that the types of sites being built with Concrete really warrant the core database being rethought. Populating another RAG database with information about a Concrete site seems far more believable to me. We’ve certainly used 3rd party search indexes in the past because as John points out, the core search in Concrete is very very bare bones. It’s hard for me to see us delivering a search experience that rivals what people expect from hosted closed source solutions with billions of dollars of investment in them. Perhaps a DB shift to Postgres is easier than I’m imagining and delivers more immediate rewards than I understand today?
I see some low hanging fruit for the marketplace that I’m kinda shocked people haven’t built yet:
- The file chooser already has a sidebar and architecture that lets you connect it to 3rd party sources, we use it to connect to BrandCentral (our stand alone DAM on Concrete) for army sites. Connecting to popular AI image generators there seems like a no brainer.
- The description & meta-description attributes have event handlers and there is a bulk SEO tool built into the dashboard. Someone building an add-on that pipes the content of a page to a LLM and returns a short description for the page in those places seems like something I’d buy.
- Translation is a cumbersome process, it feels like a LLM could do a semi-acceptable job of block level content in a different language for someone tasked with turning a recently built out page tree from english to spanish or what-have-you.
- Better integration with a 3rd party search service would be delightful. We spend a lot of time tinkering with elastic search and we still struggle to deliver what clients have learned to expect from google.
- I’m sure there’s a good deal more creative ideas for AI powered extensions that we’d happily review and approve if they were submitted to the marketplace.
That all said, there’s an entirely different angle we’ve thinking about here at PortlandLabs.
AI is helping us write faster. But it hasn’t yet solved my biggest bottleneck in digital work today: collecting and organizing the actual content.
A lifetime ago, a client would hand you a Zip drive with everything you needed for a project. Now? You’re scraping info from email threads, Slack DMs, text messages, random PDFs, and screenshots of Facebook posts. I spend half the time on a project scrolling through my downloads directory or searching email for the correct file. This problem is larger than a web project manager’s needs. If you’ve ever led volunteers, a parent group, or a team activity that took some organizing you know the pain of dozens of people trying to collaborate across different communication channels.
A lot of my thinking is about the mess before the writing even starts: what is the process for actual content collection, and why is it still so manual?
So we’ve been building Voxera. It’s a platform that joins your group’s discussions (email, text, Slack, wherever) and quietly pulls together all the assets, links, images, videos, and decisions. Then AI helps organize and summarize everything into something you can actually use.
This extracted content eventually may get built into a stand alone websites (and here’s where this matters to Concrete) we’ll be building:
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Sites that summarize group activity across platforms
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Resource hubs that reflect community conversations
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Planning sites powered by what’s actually been said and shared
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Informational that feel alive, not archived
Go take a look at the mockups under the various solutions pages we’ve thrown together.
Concrete is uniquely suited for this. Its structure, security, and extensibility give it a major edge over flashier-but-flakier tools. We’re building a deep Voxera integration with Concrete so that once you’ve gathered and refined your content, it’s one click to publish a site that delivers what you need.
None of those themes are built, all of these outputted sites are things we’d expect to run on the Concrete SaaS hosting we offer today.
Enterprise CRM platforms and some high-end marketing tools have been aggregating content from multiple communication channels for years. It’s proven to be important to big sales and marketing teams, but no one has stopped to take the same type of tooling and offer it to an individual who has to manage communications for other reasons. My hope is that Voxera can do for that space what Trello did for Kanban boards in 2011, and that the surge of organizers looking to build a website with the knowledge they’ve extracted from conversations will help give Concrete CMS the clearer market and target use-cases it’s deserved for so long.