By: Abhay Kumar Mishra, Technical Director

With the need to support content for enterprise apps at a large scale, it becomes necessary to implement headless CMS (Content Management System) in the overall solution. One of the hot topics of interest today for the tech leadership in an organization is to design and implement headless CMS solutions to support the driving force of developers’ increasing need for flexibility and control.

There are sound benefits in integrating headless CMS with enterprise apps, and by using its API, it makes it easier for developers to use any JavaScript frameworks like React, Vue.js, or Angular to quickly deploy content and designs in various web pages and apps. In this article, we will discuss the increased flexibility and scalability provided by headless CMS solutions.

Headless CMS in a nutshell

To understand better what a headless CMS is, let us look at the traditional content management system first and what it was designed to serve. The traditional CMS approach for managing content is to put everything into a single bucket — content, images, HTML, CSS, JavaScript files, icons, documents, etc. That made it impossible to reuse the content because it was commingled with code.

The traditional CMS approach worked well in the past. However, with the growing need for digital platforms to evolve at a faster pace, the need for more flexible solutions has emerged. Now, enterprises are developing websites, mobile sites, apps, digital displays, conversational AI interfaces, and more. Meanwhile, to some extent, the traditional CMS has failed to keep pace with the growing digital needs. Why? Because a traditional CMS organizes content in web page oriented frameworks, thus making it impossible for the same content to adapt easily to other digital platforms and channels.

Solution

To support the need for increased flexibility and scalability that is required by enterprise apps these days, headless CMS solutions are to be considered to manage content delivery at scale.

Headless CMS Reference Architecture explained:

1. The CMS consists of Author & Publish instances. In the Author instance, content editors create/draft the content and after review and activation, the same content becomes available in Publish instances.
2. Headless CMS supports REST and GraphQL APIs, which include but are not limited to – Content Preview API, Content Management API, GraphQL API, Content Delivery API, and Images/Media API.
3. For better performance, GraphQL API, Content Delivery API & Images/Media APIs response are being cached at CDN, and these APIs are being used for delivering content and media/images from CMS to apps, websites, and digital displays, etc.
4. Exp API – These are optional application-specific Experience APIs (backend for front-end design pattern). Based on the specific need, it might also be specific to a platform. Similar results can also be achieved by using GraphQL composing responses in API Gateway, without specifying the business logic.
5. CDN: Used to cache CMS Delivery API response and all static web assets (HTML, typescript, JavaScript, CSS, icons, etc.), static content assets (images, videos, etc.) for all client apps at CDN for better performance. Based on the deployment needs, it may involve multiple CDN usage.
6. API Gateway: It handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, traffic management, CORS support, authorization, and access control, throttling, monitoring, and API version management.
7. To support multi-lingual global sites and accelerate the content translation process, it will be efficient to integrate the translation service with Content Management systems.

What does this mean to the business?

1. Faster time to market as developers can leverage headless CMS APIs to get the desired response for content fragments.
2. Ensures distinct pricing advantage – approximately up to 25% and reduction in CMS server license cost.

What does this mean for IT?

1. Developers’ increasing need for flexibility and control in using front-end framework is at an all-time high these days. Using headless CMS’s API, front-end developers can use any JavaScript frameworks like React, Vue.js, or Angular to quickly deploy content and designs in various web pages and apps.
2. Quick development process as headless CMS APIs is front-end developer friendly.
3. Upgrade/ CMS changes will have minimal impact on consuming channels, which means less effort is spent on application support.
4. As opposed to traditional CMS, for a headless CMS solution, the development mindset shifts from project-focused to product-focused and thus becomes easier to manage the CMS content model, content infrastructure, etc. at a scale.

Conclusion:

The headless CMS trend is gaining traction, growing at a fast pace annually. Enterprises are embracing content infrastructure and companies are now looking for increased flexibility and scalability, which is being provided by headless CMS solutions. Designing and implementing a headless CMS solution is necessary these days for enterprises.

If you are running into integration issues with headless CMS solutions, let us help mitigate that for you. Please connect with us to know more about the advantages your business can get with headless CMS design and implementation.