Cutting through the deluge of marketing-speak:<p>A Headless CMS is a GUI that simply lets nontechnical people manage content in a database (as opposed to traditional WordPress, which included front-end templating logic). These aren't super new but they are good. They're extra good in a world where you're increasingly likely to have multiple front-ends for a single application.
Some background: I spent 6 years building customer Django sites; for the last 3.5 years I've been doing IoT.<p>For many organizations, a headless CMS are going to be more and more of a requirement, as more content is delivered to non-web or and non-mobile contexts. Some examples:<p>1. Shipping content into voice or chat bots.<p>2. Shipping content to embedded devices like touch screens on home appliances or factory machines.<p>Going beyond the separation of the data store and the presentation layer: A lot of people haven't yet felt the pain of using traditional relational data for these nontraditional channels. In voice and chat, for example, a knowledge graph is much more helpful than a bunch of relational data (or at least alongside relational data).<p>On the flip side of this all: my wife runs a blog, and I doubt she'll ever need more than Wordpress.<p>So, as usually, pick the right tool for the problem.
I just skimmed this article since it does seem like a bias post from a Headless CMS provider however almost all transitional CMSs that you can use/build also provide the features of a Headless CMS. WordPress has a REST API built in, Wagtail has an API built in via django-rest-framework. I'm sure if I looked almost every other CMS has solutions for this too.<p>The build vs buy decision is still straight forward. Does the headless CMS solution I'm buying provide all of the features my project will need with room to grow? Yes? Cool, why bother building it. No? Looks like I'm building my own on a "reliable framework" (tm) already used by hundreds of thousands of sites.
Keep in mind that many FOSS CMS's can also do headless. Drupal has very robust JSON:API support (as well as GraphQL through a contrib module), and WP has its own Rest API. Drupal also has a distribution specifically geared toward headless/decoupled: <a href="https://www.contentacms.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.contentacms.org</a>
"the personalized content that today’s always-on consumers crave..."<p>No, they don't. You want to sell it, which is not the same thing.
What arrogance! It may be that headless technology is an alternative to traditional CMSs, but at $ 3,500 / month I don't think it's <i>your product</i> that is killing any decision.
"headless" I don't know what field they are operating in, but in the world of financial publishing, thats called multiplatform.<p>Now, the thing that they gloss over, and the actual hard part of all of this, is not the headless bit, its getting your content in order.<p>Organising your content so you can syndicate it to people that want it is really, really hard at scale. Its almost never a technical challenge, it a question of selling and making sure people put the right tags on the right content.<p>At "Large Financial News company" The basic idea was there, the execution was lacking though:<p>GUI(in fat client and web) -> content database -> frontends<p>When stuff was being redesigned, most of the effort was in the front end. The content already had an API, it was polluted by politics and idiot architects, but it was there.
What I generally need is a CMS that requires minimal maintenance over the time frame of a decade or more. Static html generation, doesn't have 50 bazillion dependencies, written in a language that isn't moving fast.<p>Actually, what I really need is a stable, portable <i>file format</i>, since editors will continually bloat up and die in the natural life cycle of software projects.
What I would like is the opposite : a front-end that adapts itself to the any model. You give it data, and it organizes information to display it on a screen automagically, to be explorable, no matter the number of dimension in the data
Interesting that there's lots of languages supported, but Python is conspicuously absent. Why no love for Python, Contentstack?<p>Also, article is more an advertisement than anything educational. And here I am making the situation slightly worse.
SSG FTW!<p>- Cross platform<p>- Best performance<p>- Ultimate security - no database or server code<p>- Use awesome development tools for funky stuff<p>- Easy to migrate to another thing<p>- Easy to experiment with in development settings<p>- Have small services for dynamic stuff that can be sepparatelly developed (comments, profiles etc.)<p>Its good to see era of Joomla and friends is coming to an end.