✂️ Intro - Overview of JAMstack, CMS, & Headless-CMS
🌄 With a content-driven business or organization, choosing a CMS for your content management and strategy may help you avoid doomsday -All jokes aside and forgoing pithy idioms to catch your attention with the intro: One of the foundational layers of the Internet is content, whether we watch videos on YouTube, scroll through pictures on Instagram, or read articles written by arm-chair analysts about what stocks to buy or which stock to sell. What is the process by which the web manages all of this content? Content management systems (CMS) facilitate the delivery of each content medium.
This post will explain what a Content Management System(CMS) is, what a Headless CMS is, and introduce you to the JAMstack architecture, as well as a review of six of the best options for going headless today, depending on your unique business needs. My goal was to provide a healthy amount of information for product managers, developers, and content teams, currently evaluating different options, and to assist them in making an informed purchasing decision if they decide to use a headless CMS, whether Git-based or API-based; Restful-API or GraphQL-based.
⚙️ Table-Of-Contents
📑 What is a Content-Management-System (CMS)?
A content management system (CMS) is a software application or set of related programs that are used to create and manage digital content. A CMS may serve as a central repository containing documents, images, and other files that can be accessed, managed, and published by multiple users with different levels of access and permissions. A CMS typically provides a web-based interface that allows users to log in, create and edit content, and publish changes to a website or other digital content repository. Some common features of a CMS include the ability to track and manage revisions to content, create and manage user accounts and permissions, and support multiple languages.
As web2.0 evolved, WordPress became the king of content management systems. Increasingly, people are moving away from WordPress because of its inflexibility, security, and performance problems. Despite this, WordPress is still an extremely important CMS for publishers, bloggers, and marketers, and currently powers 40% of all websites. When used headless via APIs, it also qualifies for the JAMstack architectural seal of approval.
Content drives most of the web, after all, content is king. To achieve desired economic outcomes, it may be worthwhile to review how other successful businesses store and distribute their content. Our goal is to reduce as much risk as possible by analyzing competitive and comparative data to achieve a validated content management strategy - we’ll now discuss some information about modern software architecture design to further support your purchase decision.
📚 What is Jamstack Architecture and how is it being used today?
The term JAMstack was coined by Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann in 2015. It’s a modern web development architecture based on client-side JavaScript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markup– The JAMstack philosophy was designed to overcome many of the challenges posed by traditional monolithic software architectures. In a monolithic architecture, the entire codebase, including the front-end and back-end services, is one entity. As a result, changes made to the front end may require persistent changes to the back end. It can be very time consuming and challenging to complete this task.
The JAMstack approach, however, separates the front end and back end, which allows changes to be made to the front end without affecting the back end. This can save a lot of time and effort, and make development much more efficient– Building websites and apps using this philosophy is focused on scalability, content availability, performance, security, cost optimization, portability, and improved developer experience.
Within this philosophy, applications are typically built using static site generators(SSGs), such as Gatsby.js or Hugo and everything lives within GitHub or another version control system. For more information about static-site generators (SSGs), specifically, please check out my previous post, titled, Building Static Website In An Un-Static World.
🎆 As a general rule, JAMstack Architecture consists of the following principles:
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The front end of the application is built using JavaScript (ReactJS, VueJS, etc.).
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Backend data and functionality are accessed via APIs (RESTful APIs and GraphQL).
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Markup is prebuilt and served from a CDN, in contrast to being generated at run time
🎇 The benefits of using a JAMstack Architecture include:
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Improved security: JAMstack applications are built using static files, which are more secure than dynamic files.
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Increased performance: JAMstack applications are served from a CDN, which can provide a significant performance boost (Fastly, Cloudflare, etc)
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Reduced costs: JAMstack applications are typically cheaper to host than traditional monolithic apps and web applications - practically serverless, made available via APIs and microservices
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Increased scalability: JAMstack applications can be easily scaled to meet the demands of high traffic based on engagement metrics
⚔️ 📚 What is Headless CMS?
With the rise of JAMstack architecture from monolithic within the world of software development and engineering architecture design, the headless CMS was born - For a refresher, JAMstack maintains that the front end (client-side or view layer) is separate or decoupled from the back end: business logic and data, or model-layer: think user authorization, payment rails, etc.).
The concept of headless CMS is to remove the management of content from the front end, with the front end requesting resources from the CMS when needed, or a back-end-only content management system – A headless content management system (CMS) makes content accessible via an API or is Git-based, and is used to distribute content across different channels and devices.
There is no built-in templating language in a headless CMS, so it cannot be used to render pages independently. To render pages, it must be combined with a front-end framework.(ReactJS, VueJS, AngularJS, etc)– There are a number of key performance benefits to this design, as well as providing developers and content teams with more flexibility to scale your product and services over time, making content available anywhere you expose an endpoint to fetch data from the CMS.
When thinking about the target customers for Headless-CMS, the user groups are very similar to more traditional content management systems but are more uniquely positioned for businesses and projects that require content to be made available cross-platform and across channels for wider distribution and reach.
It’s important to think about the content strategy side of the service too, not just the developers. For writers and publishers, headless cms have some key benefits over traditional cms systems, including the ability to more easily publish content across channels, devices, and geographic regions in a more personalized targeted structure. As well as having a single source of reference for storing all content. Many of the Headless-CMS systems are open source, allowing teams to build on top of them, which has most likely led to teams questioning the need to build out proprietary systems from scratch.
Within enterprise organizations, there have traditionally been entire teams deployed to build, maintain, and improve thier internal proprietary content management systems. The headless movement trend has introduced an opportunity for larger companies that have historically relied on proprietary systems to adopt open-source solutions that can scale to thier individual needs.
Now let’s take some time to review 6 available Headless-CMS solutions that could potentially solve your unique business challenges– By no means, does this list of CMS systems represent each of the available systems on the market…
🎆 🏅 6 of the best Headless content management systems to consider (CMS)
1. Cloud Canon
As a Git-based headless CMS, CloundCannon lets you sync your code via GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket, and configure your preferred editing environment, command-line options, and deployment methods - From there, you can collaborate across departments. On-page editing functionality, through the visual editor and reusable components, appeals to marketing and go-to-market teams. The editor does not need knowledge of Git, SSGs, HTML, Markdown, or any other technical concepts.
There are multiple user groups targeted by Cloud Cannon. Editing tools and page builders are available to content teams. Using Git workflows, developers can manage both content and code. Enterprise customers who need to easily scale their marketing websites and services using targeted content, and agencies that need to manage client websites and apps from a single dashboard view will benefit greatly from thier CMS.
2. Sanity
One of Sanity’s key value propositions is the ability to collaborate in real time with your content team through Sanity Studio, allowing different members of your content team to work on content simultaneously and in real time. Sanity is an open source data-driven content solutions platform that was designed to be built on top of. For large, cross-functional content teams that need to work asynchronously, this is a key advantage of their service over the competition.
Using the editing view, users can ingest analytics data from Google Analytics, for example, and create dashboards that solve their pain points. Furthermore, widgets can be created to further enhance the editing experience for marketers, writers, and anyone else on your content team who needs to interact directly with content.
Structured content models underlie Sanity’s approach to content delivery. The combination of all these features creates an extremely unique authoring experience for your content team, allowing innovation to happen within your CMS, leading to more optimized content.
As with other services we’ve reviewed, Sanity’s core use cases are eCommerce, landing page marketing sites, product pages, and cross-platform mobile and web applications that use shared content and content models. Considering its modularity and open-source nature, this platform can excel at distributing content across multiple channels.
3. Headless- WordPress
Though WordPress itself does not fit into the JAMstack bucket, it can be used in a headless CMS setup, via GraphQL and Apollo Clint, for example. The fact that this service has been widely used and adopted throughout the web2.0 era means that many publishers, writers, developers, and marketers, unwilling to try new tools, choose it since it is what they know.
As a result of its open-source nature and market penetration, it makes for a powerful tool that can satisfy the needs of both developers and publishers. If your content team is change-averse, a headless WordPress setup may be the best option for you.
4. Butter CMS
The ButterCMS platform was created in 2015 to satisfy the needs of both marketers and developers on one platform. The marketers want control over their content, and the developers want their time back-Butter does both. Blog engines, eCommerce experiences, agency content management, marketplaces, and cross-platform content management between native mobile, mobile-web, and web are among Butter’s primary use cases – Although their core value proposition is said to be the leanness of the code, I do not have any experience or knowledge of their platform to support this claim.
Currently, Butter CMS is the highest-ranked headless CMS on G2. According to their messaging, the platform was built by developers for developers, but with marketers in mind. Butter offers a range of starter projects to get you up and running with your next project quickly, which could decrease time to market as well as assist teams in rapid prototyping.
5. Contentful
A major design philosophy at Contentful is the Composable Content Platform, which allows digital experiences to be broken down into smaller pieces so that they can be reused over and over again, across channels, across regions, and for more easily targeted experiences based on localization (i18n).) - Contentful was a pioneer of the headless movement, and many platforms have entered the market to compete with their core service offering.
For developers, Contentful’s headless CMS can reduce time-to-market by eliminating manual migrations, removing the need to build a proprietary CMS, and removing backlogs of content changes.
They enable Product Managers to create content models that can be easily replicated and leveraged by other teams and reused when needed, again, decreasing time-to-market, therefore, reducing complexity for the dev teams. Furthermore, it allows for common components of content modules to be synced in order to be reused in the future wherever they are needed.
6. FrontMatter
The FrontMatter CMS is built on top of Visual Studio code, which offers a unique value proposition for developers who need to manage both content and code concurrently. Due to its usability targeted at the developer community, it makes managing content easier for developers and teams. Among its primary benefits is the ability to organize your content auto-magically for SSGs such as Jekyll, Hugo, and VuePress by utilizing your file system.
Another key value proposition of FrontMatter is its built-in SEO capabilities. From the Global Settings, users can access key metrics that can assist developers and technical content teams with optimizing their content, such as keywords and descriptions. Additionally, you can see the number of headings, paragraphs, and internal and external links within your content. For a free CMS this powerful, the features are extensive. The system solves a very unique pain point for developers and content teams that would prefer to manage both content and code from within Visual Studio Code.
It can be used for global marketing and localization, eCommerce, Support Portals, knowledgebases, FAQ pages, and learning centers, as well as mobile app optimizations, where content is shared across devices, regions, and geographical locations.
🌍 Conclusion
Depending on the requirements of your application, the optimizations achieved through using this approach to software development and maintenance (JAMstack & Headless-CMS), may be the best option for you and your team– In a world of ever-increasing challenges and risks brought on by macroeconomic and geopolitical concerns, reducing complexity as an optimization may serve as both a business-level and project-level control that will lead to improved economic outcomes for your business in the long-run.
In this post, what did we learn? The first thing we covered was what a CMS is, then we covered the JAMstack, and finally, we discussed what a headless-cms is, along with 6 options to evaluate as part of your purchasing process.
The purpose of content management systems (CMSs) is to allow users to manage, create, edit, and publish content. Revision control, content access control, content storage, formatting management, search, and publishing are some of the key features of a CMS. In the aftermath of the shift from monolithic to JAMstack, in which the view layer and backend are separated to reduce costs, and complexity, and improve security and scalability, the headless CMS was born.
To end this post, I will call out one of the key trends in 2021-current in software development and tech, namely the introduction of more complex back-end-as-a-service platforms (BaaS), which are often cloud-based services that allow developers to build complex front-ends without having to manage back-end dependencies themselves. It ranges from payment platforms like Stripe to complete BaaS platforms that manage, authenticate, and authorize users. Though the BaaS movement does not directly align with JAMstack, both achieve similar outcomes and are optimizations or services intended to achieve similar outcomes.
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