Since the early 2000s, technical experts have seen explosive growth of Content Management Systems (CMS) usage in various industries around the world. Customers preferred using CMS products to improve turnaround time to market; more time to create content meant less time worrying about banal website technicalities.
However, times have changed. While wildly effective in its heyday, desktop-based enterprise solutions have shifted dramatically, and the need is elsewhere; now, customers approach companies in various ways: from phones to tablets to existing apps to social media – while fantastic, this has proved difficult for traditional CMS solutions to support customers.
How did a traditional CMS work? Technical experts would build websites using themes and templates to the customer’s wishes, supporting clients from selection of an appealing UI to implementation using Java, PHP, etc to render attractive text and images. So technically, a traditional, or coupled, CMS contains a model layer for providing content forms, a database layer to persist content, and a view layer to render HTML on a browser.
While a traditional/coupled CMS solved basic problems over a conventional non-CMS website, it left questions unanswered for omnichannel scalability. What if a customer wants to build a mobile app or a kiosk? What if they want to reuse the same content as a website for a uniform experience?
For enterprises with omnichannel, the traditional coupled CMS couldn’t meet all needs, and something better had to be created – a solution where there is a centralized content repository that serves to multiple channels. The concept of Headless CMS resolved these problems.
Headless CMS is a solution where the content model and persistence are in the CMS, but the view is elsewhere in the channel where it is rendered. Also referred to as API First CMS, it is future-proof and provides fast content delivery.
There are multiple Headless CMS products in the market. Some of the market-leading products include Contentful, Contentstack, dotCMS, etc.
Let’s discuss more about Contentful in our next blog. Stay tuned!
