What is a Headless CMS?

According to Wikipedia:

A headless content management system, or headless CMS, is a back-end-only content management system that acts primarily as a content repository. A headless CMS makes content accessible via an API for display on any device, without a built-in front-end or presentation layer.

Our recommendations for best in class Headless CMS are:

• Craft CMS
• Contentful
• Sanity.io
  

Headless CMS's often act as components of a modular web systems that, as suggested by Wikipedia or Contentful, coexist and communicate with one another via Application Programming Interfaces (API's) like GraphQL.

A modular web system can be defined as:

A system that is composed of interchangeable, independent, stack agnostic components and which perform, allow to manage and maintain the design and content of a website and/or all its services.

GraphQL is a query language for APIs that allows you to gather data requests for exactly what you need.

System's of this type were initially brought to our attention by the MACH Alliance, which is comprised of members that present and advocate for an open and best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystem. The ecosystem technology is:

• Microservices: Individual pieces of business functionality that are independently developed, deployed, and managed.
• API*-first: All functionality is exposed through an API.
• Cloud-native SaaS**: SaaS that leverages the cloud, beyond storage and hosting, including elastic scaling and automatically updating.
• Headless : Front-end presentation is decoupled from back-end logic and channel, programming language, and is framework agnostic.

* Application Programming Interface

** Software as a Service

The ability to control and safe-guard your intellectual property on a virtual private network, granting public access only to necessary people or components.

By dividing services and websites into separate containers, you reduce risk and gain the ability to select an ideal technology stack for each area and request.

Not only can each system scale well but each can scale independently.

If you are interested in learning about the process that it took to build our modular website powered by a headless Craft CMS that programmatically generates all our pages and layouts via React & the GraphQL