What's next for HubSpot CMS?

Stand still and you're moving backwards in the tech world. Find out what's likely to be up and coming for the HubSpot CMS system in the near future.

Picture of Paul Marshall Paul Marshall

Published: 30 Sep 2016

5 minutes read

What's next for HubSpot CMS?

The HubSpot CMS system is always evolving, in fact HubSpot commit hundreds of changes to the cloud software every year, but larger iterations and features come along less often. Here’s where I think the next changes for this great platform are coming from.

The inline editor

This one is already in the wild, though it’s still marked as beta, so you may or may not have experienced it yet. The original HubSpot editor involved showing you a preview of the page on the right hand side but with no ability to interact with it. Instead all of the editing was done in the left hand pane. It was light years ahead of anything else but HubSpot decided to move the editor on even further with their new interface. Now when you go to edit a page you scroll down to the section you want to make changes to, click on the edit icon appears and you can actually make changes to the content live in the editor. As a backup there’s still a left hand pane available which lists all of the content and modules that are currently on the page so you can leap to those and edit on the left with the preview updating once you’ve saved your changes.

Once you’ve used the new system you’ll wonder how you ever got along with it and how you ever put up with CMSs that don’t have this feature.

AMP

You may have not heard of accelerated mobile pages, but it’s highly likely you’ve experienced them whilst out and about on the web, especially on social media. On your Facebook feed there’s often articles from people like the Guardian that seem to appear instantly when you click on them, large image at the top and the rest of the text loaded and ready to read.

The AMP project was the brainchild of Google, a way of stripping back content to a ‘reader’ style so when loaded on a mobile they’re absolutely instant, all the fuss and periphery of a normal web page gone and just the content left. It’s different and more aggressive in its culling than normal responsive design. When implemented in WordPress you just get the featured image, title and content loading if you use the Automattic plugin, which is great as it takes your full post content and applies the stripping to it, so there’s no need to write the content twice, there’s just an AMP version available of it.

This is more of a news and blogs thing, it’s unlikely you’d want to the use the AMP methodology for your general pages, but for article consumption it’s an absolute dream. The HubSpot system is setup in such a way that they should be more than capable of replicating the WordPress system and automatically displaying any blog content in an AMP format. I’m looking forward to it coming online soon as it really does give a great mobile UX.

New Bootstrap

When HubSpot first came up with the HubSpot CMS system, they adopted a similar system that was around at the time in the Twitter Bootstrap framework. This was a freely available responsive framework that developers and designers alike could use as an underlying system for creating mobile friendly websites. It also came bundled with a series of styles for various elements on a site such a header styles, form fields and buttons. It’s evolved over the past few years, setting and following trends such as movement to flat design, it has been a great friend to those who want to rapidly prototype and develop websites.

One of its biggest evolutions was when it switched to a mobile first setup. Originally, like a lot of responsive frameworks, its standard styles targeting desktops and then it had a series of other rules that were applied as the screen it was being viewed on got smaller and smaller. This made a lot of sense whilst you had older browsers like IE7 & IE8 that simply don’t understand media queries, so you only have to have one stylesheet that can work for older browsers and newer technology. As things have moved on the need to support the older browsers has diminished somewhat (during a website redesign we tend to analyse the current sites older browser usage and allow that to dictate how much time and effort we think there should be going into targeted styles for older browsers) it made more sense to switch it around and start with the mobile design first, adding additional rules as the screen real estate increases.

I wasn’t using the Bootstrap system when this switch occurred, but I can imagine those who were probably had a bit of a job transitioning to the new framework as it was such a major change. It’s not something to be taken lightly which is why HubSpot has held off making the transition to a mobile first framework. I think they can’t simply swap the two over as it’d probably break quite a few sites that weren’t expecting it, but I do hope that there’s an option on the way where we can select which framework to use. We’ve generated our stylesheets in a mobile first way for such a long time now we’d be happy to see the switch happen as soon as possible.

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