In 2020, "Coronavirus" was the most popular search word and news item in Google search rankings. Hundreds of millions were looking for information about the pandemic online and following the vaccine development updates. 

At Pantheon, for years, we have increasingly felt that website publishing is fundamentally broken. A few years ago, we started sketching out a vision for how to fix it. Last year, we started designing a new product and writing code. Now, we are ready to preview our first innovation in a new vision for website technology and explain what we are building next and why.

Leveraging open source in software development is now the industry norm, including virtually every website project. The advantages of building on top of an open-source CMS significantly outweigh doing anything from scratch. Open source also wins when comparing the costs, risks, and limitations of being boxed in with a proprietary SaaS vendor. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Open source comes with long-term maintenance responsibilities.

NOTE: I updated the numbers after being asked on LinkedIn about the "other" category and discovering that outdated releases of both open source CMSs were a non-trivial portion of the long tail.