For nearly two decades, Drupal and Joomla wore the badge of "the developer's CMS" with pride. They were the platforms you reached for when WordPress felt too simple, when you needed custom content types, complex permissions, and the raw power to build anything imaginable. Developers loved them. Marketers... tolerated them.
Today, there's a new champion in the developer community, and it's doing something its predecessors never managed: earning genuine affection from both developers and marketers. That platform is Sanity, and its rise tells us everything about what modern content management has become—and what it should have been all along.
The Golden Age of Developer-First CMSs
Let's rewind to the mid-2000s. Drupal, born in 2001, and Joomla, forked from Mambo in 2005, represented a radical departure from the blogging platforms that dominated the early web. While WordPress was perfecting the art of simple publishing, Drupal and Joomla were building sophisticated content frameworks.
Drupal became legendary in developer circles for its flexibility. Its modular architecture, with over 50,000 available modules, meant you could build virtually anything. Universities built sprawling course catalogs. Government agencies created complex public portals. Enterprises deployed massive multilingual sites. Drupal didn't just manage content—it was a blank canvas where developers could architect entire digital ecosystems.
Joomla positioned itself as the middle path: more powerful than WordPress, less intimidating than Drupal. It offered robust multilingual support out of the box, flexible content positioning, and a component system that gave developers control without requiring them to build everything from scratch. For business websites that needed more than a blog but less than an enterprise portal, Joomla was the sweet spot.
Both platforms earned fierce loyalty from development teams. They were powerful, extensible, and gave developers the technical control they craved. The developer community flourished—meetups, conferences, certification programs. For years, if you wanted to be taken seriously as a web developer working in open-source CMS, you needed Drupal or Joomla on your resume.
The Marketing Problem Nobody Wanted to Admit
But there was an elephant in the room that the developer community largely ignored: marketers hated working in these systems.
The very features that made Drupal powerful made it intimidating to non-technical users. The steep learning curve wasn't a bug—it was presented as a feature. "Drupal is a framework, not a CMS," proponents would say, as if complexity was inherently virtuous. Content editors needed training sessions just to publish a blog post. Simple tasks required navigating labyrinthine admin interfaces with dozens of tabs, each hiding crucial settings.
One marketing director I spoke with years ago described her Drupal experience: "I felt like I needed a developer's permission to do my job. Want to update the homepage hero? Submit a ticket. Need to create a landing page? Wait for the sprint. Every content change felt like I was bothering someone more important."
Joomla fared slightly better with its more intuitive interface, but the admin dashboard still confused marketers accustomed to WYSIWYG editors. The extension ecosystem, while extensive, required constant oversight. Updates broke things. Plugins conflicted. Marketers who wanted to move fast found themselves blocked by technical dependencies they didn't understand.
The fundamental problem was philosophical: these platforms were built by developers, for developers. The content creator experience was an afterthought. Marketing teams were expected to adapt to the CMS, not the other way around.
When Developer-First Became a Liability
As digital marketing evolved, this developer-versus-marketer tension became untenable. Marketing teams needed velocity. They needed to launch campaigns, test messaging, iterate on content—all without waiting for development sprints. The promise of "flexibility" rang hollow when simple changes required technical intervention.
The data tells the story. Research comparing WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal consistently showed that while Drupal and Joomla offered more features, they required "stronger programming skills" and created steeper learning curves. Marketing teams voted with their feet, choosing simpler platforms even when they sacrificed functionality.
Even Drupal's own leadership recognized the problem. The recent launch of Drupal CMS 1.0 in January 2025 explicitly acknowledged this gap, with founder Dries Buytaert stating the initiative was designed to "make Drupal easier for marketers, content creators, and site builders." After 24 years, Drupal was finally admitting that developer focus alone wasn't enough.
But by then, the market had moved on. The rise of headless CMS platforms fundamentally changed what "developer-friendly" meant in content management.
Enter Sanity: A Different Kind of Developer's CMS
Sanity arrived in the mid-2010s with a radically different proposition. It was unapologetically developer-first, but it understood that "developer-first" didn't have to mean "marketer-hostile."
The platform's foundational principles felt familiar to developers who had loved Drupal and Joomla: schemas as code, complete customization, API-first architecture, structured content. But Sanity added something those platforms never prioritized: an obsessive focus on the editorial experience.
Sanity Studio, the content editing interface, is built with modern web technologies. Developers can customize every aspect of it—but here's the crucial difference: those customizations are designed to make content creators' lives easier, not to showcase technical prowess. The default Studio is clean, intuitive, and genuinely pleasant to use. Marketers don't need training to understand it.
Real-time collaboration works like Google Docs. Content editors can see each other's changes instantly. There's no confusing revision history or merge conflicts. The visual editing experience, through Sanity's Presentation tool, lets marketers click directly on their website to edit content. It feels magical to non-technical users, yet it's built on a foundation developers love: structured content with proper separation of concerns.
One G2 review captured this balance perfectly: "I just started using Sanity as a marketing person and moving all of our content to Sanity structure. The UI is great, so understandable from a marketer perspective. Also, there are no bugs at all while entering content, it's so easy."
That's not something you ever heard about Drupal.
The Technical Foundation That Changes Everything
What makes Sanity's achievement remarkable is that it didn't sacrifice developer power to achieve marketer-friendliness. If anything, it offers developers more control than traditional CMSs ever did.
Sanity treats content as structured data, not pages. This is a fundamental shift from the page-centric models of Drupal and Joomla. Content models are defined as code, living in version control alongside your application. This means content structure evolves with your project through pull requests and code review—something impossible in database-driven CMSs.
The query language gives developers SQL-like power over content, but with a syntax designed for JSON documents. You can query, filter, project, and transform content with precision Drupal's entity system could only approximate. And because content is delivered via APIs, it works seamlessly with modern frameworks like Next.js, Gatsby, and SvelteKit.
Developers praise this approach. As one reviewer noted: "The ability to define content schemas as code and build a fully customized editing experience is a game-changer. The developer experience is second to none."
But here's what's different from the old "developer's CMS" model: all this power is in service of better content experiences, not complexity for its own sake.
Breaking the Developer-Marketer Divide
The traditional CMS model created an adversarial relationship between developers and marketers. Developers guarded technical systems, marketers waited for permissions and changes, frustration mounted on both sides.
Sanity eliminates this conflict through thoughtful architecture. Developers build customized Studios that empower marketers to work independently. The schema constrains content in ways that maintain quality while giving editors freedom within those boundaries. It's governance without gatekeeping.
Marketing teams report dramatically reduced dependency on developers. Tasks that required tickets in Drupal—updating copy, swapping images, creating landing pages—happen instantly in Sanity Studio. One implementation partner noted: "With Sanity's interface and flexible deployments, your marketers will no longer need to rely on the development team for website updates and content changes. Effects? Reduced friction between departments, accelerated workflows, and quicker rollouts."
Developers, meanwhile, aren't bogged down with content change requests. They focus on building features, optimizing performance, and solving interesting technical challenges. The relationship becomes collaborative rather than transactional.
Create Once, Publish Everywhere
Sanity's killer feature for modern marketing teams is its approach to omnichannel content. While Drupal and Joomla were designed for websites, Sanity was built for content that flows everywhere: web, mobile apps, digital signage, IoT devices, partner integrations.
This "Create Once, Publish Everywhere" model resonates with marketing teams managing complex content operations. Create a product description in Sanity, and it can power your website, mobile app, printed catalog, and chatbot responses—all from the same source of truth.
This wasn't possible in traditional CMSs without significant custom development. Drupal's page-centric model fundamentally didn't support this pattern. Joomla's component architecture came closer, but still assumed content belonged to pages. Sanity's structured content approach makes omnichannel delivery the default, not an afterthought.
The business impact is tangible. Content reuse increases dramatically. One implementation reduced time-to-market for new content by 60%. Another eliminated duplicate content across platforms, cutting asset storage by 65%. Marketing teams achieve consistency across channels without manual synchronization.
Performance Without Compromise
Speed matters to both developers and marketers, and this is where Sanity's architecture creates clear advantages over traditional CMSs.
Drupal's performance challenges are well-documented. Cache invalidation complexity, heavy resource requirements, slow page loads without extensive optimization. Developers spent countless hours tuning Dispatcher configurations, warming caches, and debugging why content updates didn't propagate. Even well-optimized Drupal sites often struggled to achieve sub-second page loads.
Joomla faced similar constraints. The monolithic architecture meant every page request potentially hit the database. Performance tuning required expertise, and scaling required significant infrastructure investment.
Sanity's API-first design eliminates these problems. Content is delivered through a globally distributed CDN. Queries are fast by default. Static site generation means most pages never hit Sanity in production—they're pre-rendered at build time. One migration reported page load times dropping from 3-4 seconds to under one second, with zero cache tuning required.
This performance comes from architecture, not optimization. Developers don't waste time on cache invalidation strategies because there's nothing to invalidate. Marketers see their content changes propagate to users in seconds, not minutes. Everyone wins.
The Developer Community's Verdict
The shift in developer sentiment is striking. While Drupal and Joomla communities remain active, the momentum has clearly moved elsewhere. Sanity's developer community on platforms like GitHub, Discord, and Stack Overflow shows engagement levels that rival—and increasingly surpass—the traditional CMS giants.
Reviews for Sanity consistently emphasize developer experience: "The developer experience is second to none." "Incredibly customizable." "A game-changer." These aren't just marketing claims—they represent a fundamental shift in what developers expect from content management platforms.
More tellingly, developers who move from Drupal or Joomla to Sanity rarely go back. The combination of modern tooling, better performance, and marketer satisfaction creates a compelling case. As one developer noted: "We were stuck with a monolithic, traditional CMS that was slow and restrictive for our developers. Sanity decoupled our content from the presentation layer, allowing us to build a fast, modern frontend."
What This Means for the Future
The evolution from Drupal and Joomla to Sanity represents more than a changing of the guard—it signals a fundamental redefinition of what "developer-friendly" means in content management.
The old model prioritized developer control over editorial experience. The new model recognizes that great developer experience includes building tools that make non-technical collaborators successful. It's not enough to give developers power; modern CMSs must use that power to eliminate friction for everyone.
Drupal's recent pivot toward marketer-friendliness with Drupal CMS 1.0, complete with AI agents and easier onboarding, validates this shift. But it's also an acknowledgment that the platform is playing catch-up. After 24 years of "developers first, marketers eventually," changing market perception is an uphill battle.
Joomla faces similar challenges. While its community remains loyal, the platform struggles to articulate a clear value proposition in the modern headless CMS landscape. It's caught between WordPress's simplicity and Sanity's developer plus marketer appeal, without a clear differentiator.
The Lesson: Power Should Enable, Not Exclude
The story of how Sanity claimed the "developer's CMS" title from Drupal and Joomla offers a crucial lesson for anyone building developer tools: technical power is meaningless if it excludes the people who need to use your platform daily.
Drupal and Joomla succeeded in giving developers control. They failed to recognize that this control should serve a larger purpose—enabling great content experiences for everyone. The platforms became ends unto themselves rather than means to an end.
Sanity succeeds because it understands that developers and marketers aren't adversaries—they're collaborators with different expertise. The platform's architecture facilitates this collaboration rather than creating conflict. Developers get the tools they love. Marketers get the experiences they need. Neither is compromised.
This isn't about dumbing down technical tools. It's about recognizing that the best developer tools make everyone more productive. The mark of a truly great CMS isn't how complex it allows developers to be—it's how simple it makes everything feel for everyone else.
The Crown Passes
Drupal and Joomla earned their "developer's CMS" reputation honestly. They gave developers unprecedented control over content architecture at a time when that flexibility was revolutionary. They powered millions of websites and launched thousands of developer careers. That legacy deserves respect.
But times change, and what developers value in a CMS has evolved. Modern developers don't just want technical power—they want to work with tools that make their entire team successful. They want platforms that eliminate friction rather than creating it. They want to build great experiences, not spend weeks configuring cache layers.
Sanity claimed the crown not by being more powerful than Drupal or more flexible than Joomla, but by redefining what a developer's CMS should be: a platform that developers love to build with and marketers love to use. It's a simple idea that somehow took two decades to fully realize.
The question isn't whether Sanity will maintain this position—new challengers will always emerge. The question is whether future content platforms will learn the lesson: developer tools should empower everyone, not just developers. The crown belongs to whoever understands that best.
And right now, that's Sanity.
