Your CMS should not know what your website looks like

The fastest way to make content unusable is to store it as a layout.

Symptoms

You know you have this problem when moving a post to a new design means opening every entry, or when the answer to "can we put this on the mobile app too?" is no.

Model the shape, not the page

A blog post has a title, a body, an author and a date. That is true whether it renders as a web page, an RSS item, a newsletter, or a card in an app. The two-column layout with the pull quote on the right is a rendering decision, and it belongs in the code that renders.

The test

Ask whether you could rebuild the front end from scratch, in a different framework, without touching a single entry. If the answer is no, the layout has leaked into the content.