Learn about headless Content Management Systems: what they are, how they work, and how they differ from traditional CMSes like WordPress. We explore the uses of headless content, and how to apply it to websites, apps, and more.
Should you adopt the newer “headless” approach to content management? Or stick with a traditional, monolithic system.
While Content Management Systems (CMS) have been around for a long time, there have been some big changes in what’s on lately. Let’s explore the differences between the two approaches and look at how Sanity is an evolution of both.
A headless CMS is a content management system that provides a way to author content, but instead of having your content coupled to a particular output (like web page rendering), it provides your content as data over an API.
The “head” relates to where your content ends up, and the “body” is where your content is stored and authored. This might sound a little strange at first, but the point of a headless CMS isn't that you don't want or need a head, it's that you get to pick and choose which heads (outputs) you send your content to.
As opposed to headless, a “traditional CMS” is software that you either install and have to manage on your own, or on a managed server environment. Traditional CMSes are also called “monolithic” because they pack all the functionality and assumptions for how you want to work into a single system. Traditional CMSes often provide a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) content editing interface because they only have one context for presenting the content – usually a web page.
A headless CMS works by:
Most headless CMSes are offered as a Software as a Service (SaaS), meaning that your editors will have to log into a web application and that the APIs are hosted in a cloud-based backend. Some headless CMSes will let you host the whole solution on your own server and database. In this model means you have to do your own scaling and operations.
A headless CMS gives editors an interface for easily managing content, while providing APIs for developers to build applications, making it simpler and faster to store, edit and publish content. They differ from traditional and decoupled CMSes because they are API-exclusive, and have nothing to do with content rendering. Choosing a headless CMS