What is a headless CMS?

Following our previous article titled "Should you ban CMSs like WordPress as a web developer?", we received a lot of comments from developers who have a preconceived idea of CMSs, seeing them as tools "to be avoided".

But what we especially noticed was that the concept of headless CMS was barely mentioned in the debates, so there's still work to be done to popularize these platforms...

Today we're going to look at what a "headless" CMS is and discover a few examples!

A back-office, and that's it!

If you're familiar with classic CMSs, you know that all platforms consist of two distinct parts: the back-office and the front-office. The former is used to configure the platform as well as add, edit, or delete data, while the latter displays to the visitor the "laid out" version of that data.

This is also commonly referred to as the admin side and the user side.

On the contrary, a "headless" CMS will offer us a back-office and... that's it! The entire front-office part must be developed by hand using any technology, as long as it can communicate with the CMS!

What's the benefit?

What is often held against CMSs is their heaviness, whether in terms of loading time, code cleanliness, or overall user experience.

On the other hand, they are favored for their speed of deployment, their flexibility in terms of customization, and the possibility of giving control to someone non-technical, often a client.

The benefit of a headless CMS is that it reconciles all of this by offering an experience that is both flexible and understandable on the back-office side, along with a completely customized front-office that can be optimized to the fullest!

An additional advantage is being able to maintain consistency and harmony in front-end skills by choosing the same framework everywhere, given that it's quite rare to find classic CMSs that are both powerful and based on recent front-end technologies!

Communication between the two will happen through an API (and sometimes its SDK) provided by the CMS and easily integrable into your front-end, or your SSR framework for example.

A few examples of headless CMS

Strapi

To me, this is the ideal tool for deploying an ultra-flexible and intuitive back-office in no time.

The documentation is well made and can guide you easily even when adding business logic to the tool if needed.

Official website: https://strapi.io/

Ghost

I've already mentioned this, but the blog you're currently reading was created with Ghost, with the difference that I also use the front-office part with the Casper theme.

But if you want to create a highly customized blog while keeping a super pleasant editor, I can only recommend the headless version of Ghost!

Official website: https://ghost.org

Squidex

Its strong point: The back-office part, which is highly customizable! The ability to edit multiple resources in list form also saves a lot of time!

It's also one of the only alternatives developed in C# .Net, if that's a constraint for you!

Official website: https://squidex.io/

Contentful

This is the only non-open-source alternative among these examples, but it's also the only one (on this list) to offer a GraphQL API instead of a REST API.

I haven't had the chance to use it since I prefer self-hostable solutions, but since I often see it mentioned, I didn't want to hide its existence from you.

Official website https://www.contentful.com/

WordPress

I know what you're thinking, that WordPress isn't a headless CMS, and yet it is too! If you don't want to use WordPress's entire theme system and want to build your front-end part from scratch, it provides a native REST API.

Official website https://wordpress.org/