A look ahead at the roadmap for 2024

This year, Redakt will celebrate its third birthday. The initial release of Redakt CMS was in February 2021. Since then, we haven't stopped, and in the meantime, cool features were added (and bugs fixed!). Right now, Redakt is a very stable system capable of serving high traffic loads on much fewer resources than competitive products. 

These past three years, we were primarily focused on creating the best experience for what Redakt is at its core: a great content management system. We feel that now the time is right to start working on some major new features to propel Redakt to the next level. So, in no particular order, here is our roadmap of product development for 2024.

Although A/B and multivariate testing is already possible with external tools, Redakt CMS does not yet have built-in support for it. As this is an important part of becoming a complete content management solution, this is a feature we are already working on. Redakt does already support different content versions, and we will be expanding that feature to support A/B and multivariate testing.

With the structure for A/B and multivariate testing in place, the next logical step is personalization. Personalization is the process of creating and displaying individually customized experiences for website visitors. This experience can be based on how a visitor navigates throug a website, search queries, geographical location, device information, etcetera. A personalized experience can range from something as simple as changing a single label on a button to a whole different website layout and styling.

There is no doubt that Generative AI will continue to evolve and grow in the future. While we believe that human input will remain required for quality content authoring, we see many practical applications where generative AI can play a role and assist with the process. For example by suggesting blog topics, tagging and categorization, and writing summaries. These can all be integrated into the Redakt content management experience.

When we started development of our Blazor-based back-office application in 2019, the only available hosting model was Blazor Server. With the UI rendering server-side, this also meant there was no real need for a web API for content authoring, so we didn't make any (although we do have a Content Delivery API for headless operation). As part of ASP.NET Core 8, Blazor has introduced new (automatic) rendering modes. These can benefit the performance of our back-office application, so we will upgrade our back-office project to the new .NET version. This will also give us an opportunity to refactor some areas where we had to build workarounds in the past that have since become out-of-the-box Blazor features.

We will also need to support Blazor WebAssembly in order to use the new automatic rendering mode. And this means we will have to develop an API through which every back-office task can be done. This is a rather drastic change to our back-office application, however we believe it can also benefit our clients. The new API can be used for custom-developed features as well. And it will further improve the possibilities for integrating with other systems.

While the term Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is not precisely defined, it typically means a platform with a rich set of multi-channel content related features and integration possibilities. Over the past couple of years, we have focused mainly on the content management part of a DXP, although Redakt CMS already has many features that could be considered a DXP feature. With the addition of the features mentioned here, we feel that Redakt will have earned the title of Digital Experience Platform.

So at some point in the future we will rename Redakt CMS to Redakt DXP. Even though it's a small name change, it better reflects the possibilities that Redakt offers and what people usually associate with a CMS versus a DXP.

So far, Redakt CMS has always been a self-hosted (either cloud or on-premises) development framework. Redakt is a very open and customizable system, and to make full use of that, you may need to implement your own components and business logic. This model will remain our primary focus for Redakt. However, this can not typically be accommodated on a shared Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform.

Not all our clients require the full extent of Redakt's customization features, and care-free managed hosting may be more valuable to them. Therefore, we will introduce a subscription-based Cloud Edition with reduced customizability but the same performance and content authoring experience.

While these are all features that we plan to be working on this year, we are also looking ahead beyond 2024. Following are a couple of features that we do not yet have a clear planning for, but want to work on at some point in the future.

In the meantime, we will also continue to work on other minor features and changes. Keeping Redakt CMS up to date and future-proof is one of the most important goals of our product development.