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Headless CMS Is Killing the Buy vs. Build Decision

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Re: Headless CMS Is Killing the Buy vs. Build Decision

#31

Post by _bxg1 »

asien wrote: post #25
_bxg1 wrote: post #11

Cutting through the deluge of marketing-speak: 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.

> A Headless CMS is a GUI that simply lets nontechnical people manage content in a database. 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…

> a content management system served through an API

That phrase doesn't make any sense.

> legacy render-based CMS like Wordpress / Joomla where the database is completely tied to framework will decrease

That's exactly what I said.

> 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.

I think you may be getting the front-end GUI and back-end GUI mixed up. A headless CMS omits the front-end GUI, but includes a back-end (content management) GUI. It admittedly also includes a light CRUD API over the database, so it's slightly more than I initially said, but not much.

Here's a more in-depth explanation. Maybe this will clear things up for you: https://css-tricks.com/what-is-a-headless-cms/

Re: Headless CMS Is Killing the Buy vs. Build Decision

#33

Post by _bxg1 »

brightball wrote: post #19
_bxg1 wrote: post #11

Cutting through the deluge of marketing-speak: 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.

For my blog, I actually just edit the database directly and have triggers setup to handle all of the various associated changes. But I’m weird like that. :)

Yeah, as a technical person there isn't much point to using a CMS unless you want a WYSIWYG editor or something. I suppose it could help ensure data integrity if you're using a noSQL DB.

Re: Headless CMS Is Killing the Buy vs. Build Decision

#35

Post by Dylan16807 »

zdragnar wrote: post #29
KaiserPro wrote: post #23

"headless" I don't know what field they are operating in, but in the world of financial publishing, thats called multiplatform. 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 quest…

"Headless" is a pretty old term in IT, basically for anything that operates without a dedicated monitor or view as part of the primary access. 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 emb…

But that's not what it's being used to mean here. The 'head' for a CMS would be the interface you use to edit it, which is orthogonal to the intermingling between the data and the frontend templating that they're actually talking about.

Re: Headless CMS Is Killing the Buy vs. Build Decision

#36

Post by dschiffner »

_bxg1 wrote: post #11

Cutting through the deluge of marketing-speak: 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.

Maybe I'm nitpicking, but you don't have to use the front-end templating in WordPress if you don't want to these days. It has a REST API, so you could use it as a headless CMS.

Postlight has a pretty cool WordPress/React starter kit https://postlight.com/labs/wordpress-react-starter-kit

Re: Headless CMS Is Killing the Buy vs. Build Decision

#37

Post by xsmasher »

shareIdeas wrote: post #14
_bxg1 wrote: post #11

Cutting through the deluge of marketing-speak: 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.

The goal is to use less skilled labor? I can't help but to think back on my experiences, that's going to make a terrible program.

No, the goal is to allow people with a different set of skills (content creators) to create content, even though they don't have database or engineering skills.

I'd used systems like this at every game company I've worked for to allow writers, game designers, and translators work on content without having an engineer in their dev loop.

Re: Headless CMS Is Killing the Buy vs. Build Decision

#38

Post by winternett »

rossdavidh wrote: post #32

"the personalized content that today’s always-on consumers crave..." No, they don't. You want to sell it, which is not the same thing.

Too many bloggers pushing headless are presenting the idea that traditional CMS'es aren't also pushing forward. Traditional CMS solutions are not dying, even the infrastructure (processing and resources) are moving forward fast to improve everything as well.

There is a constant industry need to change CMS and app configuration without pushing code, this is a big thing that Headless can't yet manage well without a ton of extra development work, and with that you're practically building the same solution as a CMS from scratch. There are always different use cases for each scenario/solution, and as long as vendor supplied solutions are around like ServiceNow, PowerBI & SharePoint, traditional, and especially Open-Source CMS solutions aren't going anywhere.

Headless also requires a lot of work to account for unstructured data, which should, as a best practice, be fixed in your data source. Too much can slip through the test/fix gate when a bunch of customization is done to fix or re-format data at the front-end layer. Big problems occur when multiple front ends are independently displaying from one data source whenever someone tries to reformat, change, or fix data on the back-end...

As a promotional practice, trust worthy company should refrain from disparaging viable alternative methods of implementation, they should stick to promotion of their own method and speak more-so to the benefits of a well thought out solution rather than saying that competing methods are "dying" IMO.

Re: Headless CMS Is Killing the Buy vs. Build Decision

#39

Post by jordan801 »

dorothyat40 wrote: post #18
codedokode wrote: post #7

What a poor quality article, it doesn't have any explanation what a headless CMS is.

I would imagine the writer presupposes the reader already knows what a CMS is, and is trying to sell the reader on adopting it.

Which, is kind of silly. Most of the clients we have, like using Wordpress, because they are non-technical and can still have an extremely powerful website, without that.

If I am going to use a headless CMS, I'd probably just rather write my own program completely. Nothing is worse than being in the 9th inning and realizing that you have to do a major infrastructure overhaul because the program your using doesn't natively support a feature.

Re: Headless CMS Is Killing the Buy vs. Build Decision

#40

Post by _bxg1 »

dschiffner wrote: post #36
_bxg1 wrote: post #11

Cutting through the deluge of marketing-speak: 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.

Maybe I'm nitpicking, but you don't have to use the front-end templating in WordPress if you don't want to these days. It has a REST API, so you could use it as a headless CMS. Postlight has a pretty cool WordPress/React starter kit https://postlight.com/labs/wordpress-react-starter-kit

Fair; I made a clarification
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