As importance of CMS is increasing when we are talking about RESTful API, Microservices and also using CMS in Application Development. Headless CMS, Decoupled CMS & Content as a Service (CaaS) are newer things and we guess this is a timely article for our readers. Many of these terminologies are quite ill-defined and commonly for practical purposes, for some use cases.
Headless CMS, Decoupled CMS and Content as a Service (CaaS)
WordPress is example of traditional monolithic CMS where theme actually drives the frontend. That theme is a barrier in development as that is no way flexible but good for some specific purposes only. These CMS gives us a way to store data on MySQL like database, a CRUD UI and obviously ways to display the fetched data.
Decoupled CMS architecture is headless. Here, way to store data on MySQL like database, a CRUD UI is constant but
it is API that is directly related to fetching the data. So the content for the site is accessible via a web-service API, in a RESTful manner.
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Obviously WordPress has REST API that that brings that decoupled CMS architecture. But we are talking about those CMS which are Headless CMS, Decoupled CMS etc by default. A headless CMS stores and delivers content. Thats it. Exactly like a light web application with private backend. What will be at frontend that not determined by Headless CMS or Decoupled CMS.
So, at the end, we can develop a mobile application and/or a static website as frontend via API. Main advantages of Headless CMS/Decoupled CMS are :
- Omnichannel readiness (content created can be repurposed across multiple channels – website, mobile app etc)
- Flexibility
- Cloud Scalability
- Higher System Security
Decoupled CMS is slightly different as micro services are taken in to account. So Decoupled CMS is more advanced. Content as a service is the name for a new type of CMS. A CaaS hosts the content repository in the cloud
from where the content can be fetched via a RESTful API in a well-structured format, such as JSON.
There are some good examples of Headless CMS/Decoupled CMS :
1 2 | https://github.com/directus/directus https://github.com/XIMDEX/ximdex |
There is examples of CaaS too :
1 | https://github.com/dotCMS/core |
