What is a Collaborative CMS?

Speaker 0: Hi. I'm Christina. I'm director of product marketing at Directus. And I'm here to clear up one question. So what does collaborative CMS mean?

The problem with CMS is has always been that any given product is geared either to developers who are building a CMS for their colleagues or their clients, or for people who are the nontechnical end users of the CMS that the devs are building. So marketing tends to think mainly in campaigns, narratives, and speed to market. Engineering tends to think mainly in data structures, validation rules, and system integrity. So this isn't a skills gap between them. It's something else.

The result is that developer focused platforms give you power and flexibility, but they're opaque to non platforms give you power and flexibility, but they're opaque to non technical users. User friendly platforms make content editing accessible, but they constrain what the developers can build. Every time you build a CMS, you have to pick your poison and choose an architectural trade off. What we're exploring though with our new MCP tool at Directus and what we've implemented natively is bridging that divide. And here's what it looks like.

A developer can build and change collections through the natural language interface of the MCP so that they can ship faster. You can add and delete fields, insert data into your collections, build automations like flows, edit existing collections, and create multiple new collections while still configuring all the kinds of fields that are added, like making them non nullable or adding conditions, setting up validation rules, and of course, creating relationships. Meanwhile, a marketer can describe what they need in their own language. They can use the MCP to completely change the brand tone of voice and pieces of writing, edit length, shorten content, generate SEO metadata, and alter slugs. Of course, they can update items and blog posts at scale and like you'd expect, they can create new content in bulk.

So whichever user is tasked with doing something like importing the entire product catalog along with pricing tiers and regional variations, the AI understands this request and the underlying data schema creating properly structured entries with the right relationships and validation that developers have previously established. So this is the bridge between what developers and marketers traditionally do independently. The MCP allows either person to handle that middle work, and that speeds up both teams. And this is what we mean by collaborative CMS. And the MCP becomes a natural language interface for people to do all kinds of work together.

Both technical and non technical users working in the same system, speaking in their own language without needing to translate their needs into another context or language. And what we're seeing so far is development teams setting up robust data models once. Marketing teams operating within those guardrails at their natural velocity. There's no tickets, no waiting, no translation errors, and it's an end to all the rework. So could natural language interfaces remove communication friction between teams?

We think so. We're seeing it happen with our MCP integration. Companies are already using it to change how their teams work together. We're excited for you to try it. Let us know what you think.