Markus Schork is Director of Technology Solutions at Codal, a global digital consultancy. With more than 20 years in digital transformation and technology, including roles at Sanity.io and Unilever, he is a Certified MACH Architect specialising in structured content modelling, headless CMS ecosystems, and decoupled architecture. Markus has led content discovery and replatforming engagements for global consumer and B2B brands, and helps enterprise teams turn content into a strategic business asset by building content operations as long-term infrastructure rather than one-off website builds.

WYMIWYG: What You Model Is What You Get

Why is editing a website still so hard? Decades into the CMS era, content changes can still mean training sessions, tickets, or a developer. The reason is rarely the platform; it is the content model behind it. You will learn why front-end components should never dictate content structure, why so many CMS fields get set once and never touched again, and how the pursuit of flexibility becomes an authoring nightmare. You will leave knowing why your project plan needs to lead with content to inform UX and design if you want to avoid content migrations every few years.

This session demonstrates a spectrum of modeling patterns and authoring options—from wide-open page builders to fully semantic structures. It will show how each of these patterns and options shapes the daily reality of the people working inside the system: authors, reviewers, translators, and now AI agents.

Here’s what you’ll learn in this session:

• The benefits of semantic content structures—Why modeling content by what it means instead of how it looks makes it reusable across channels, easier to govern, usable by AI agents as well as people, and unlocks capabilities like personalisation and targeted delivery
• The flexibility trap—How page builders and component-driven schemas promise editorial freedom but very often deliver complexity, inconsistency, and increased development efforts
• Authoring experience—Why the daily reality of editors is a direct result of the content model, and what changes for them when structure does the work instead of training, tickets, and workarounds
• Principles to apply—A short set of modeling principles you can take to your next project