Headless CMS Is Killing the Buy vs. Build Decision

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:

1. Shipping content into voice or chat bots.

2. Shipping content to embedded devices like touch screens on home appliances or factory machines.

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).

On the flip side of this all: my wife runs a blog, and I doubt she'll ever need more than Wordpress.

So, as usually, pick the right tool for the problem.

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.

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.

At "Large Financial News company" The basic idea was there, the execution was lacking though:

GUI(in fat client and web) -> content database -> frontends

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.

This is exactly what a headless CMS is not.

A headless CMS is a content management system served through an API.

Thus, legacy render-based CMS like Wordpress / Joomla where the database is completely tied to framework will decrease because of how heavy, poorly flexible and competitive they are from every point of view.

It’s also important to note that your CMS isn’t bound to any render-full GUI like WordPress but instead can be managed from anywhere as long as you have the APIs for it.

With serverless database having exploded in popularity over the past 5 years it makes 0 sense to use any of the solutions like those.

Takes Firestore/DynamoDB /Cosmos, add one collection named « Article » and you have a rudimentary CMS to store articles with a fully operational CRUD served over HTTP. Works anywhere and will cost you 0$ once it’s cached with your favorite CDN.

Did you really read the article or did you just commented assuming what was in it ?

Also, article is more an advertisement than anything educational. And here I am making the situation slightly worse.

For instance, Chrome not too long ago released the capability to run headless. Headless servers are hardware servers without a physical monitor, keyboard or mouse (i.e. you typically interact with it via ssh or RDP). Microsoft has also used the term for windows servers and embedded devices for years.