Traditionally, in Content Management Systems, there is a tight coupling between the content and presentation. Mostly it is targeted towards creating a website. With more and more customers accessing data over mobile apps, getting notifications on their smart watches, ordering items through devices like Amazon’s IoT button, Voice activated devices like Amazon Echo, Google Assistant, and accessing data over Virtual Reality devices - it becomes increasingly important to be able to access the CMS content easily. Headless CMS is the natural outcome of the need to deliver content to multichannel.
The CMS can be running on Windows Server while the front-end application can be running on a Linux server - that’s the power of going headless. To shorten the time to market, the ability to provide an out-of-the-box API to access the data is an important feature of the headless CMS. Moreover, with the availability of APIs, the Headless CMS fits nicely into microservices architecture. Microservices architecture is the latest trend, in which separating the concerns rather than tight coupling. APIs are the new norms for the communications between the microservices.
Let’s take a look at the Headless capabilities of a few popular CMS’s available in the market:
Progress Sitefinity’s CMS introduced OData RESTful endpoints, which can be accessed from external applications like Angular, ReactJS, etc. It is worth noting Progress also provides NativeScript framework which is easily integrated with Sitefinity, which helps in created mobile apps with Javascript. With this app, it can be run on both iOS and Andriod. Tracking the customer experience and personalization is a difficulty in going headless, but Sitefinity’s Digital Experience Cloud helps with this since it works with third party applications. All this helps Sitefinity to run as a headless CMS.
Sitecore CMS introduced OData in addition to an existing REST API. In addition, the Sitecore CMS provides Sitecore JavaScript Services (JSS) client SDK for React, Vue, Angular, etc. (https://jss.sitecore.net/) -which helps in building apps for devices and also collecting user interaction data, along with the ability to personalize the experience. JSS works with the latest version of Sitecore. With API and SDKs, Sitecore helps to use the CMS in a headless way.
Other CMS’s, like Kentico and Drupal, provide headless capabilities as well.
The Headless CMS presents new challenges as well as opportunities. In the growing omnichannel world, the Headless CMS is becoming more relevant and the modern CMS providers are catching up fast in providing headless capability.
Americaneagle.com has implemented the headless CMS many times. Contact us for more information!
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