Headless CMS

What is a Headless CMS?

A Headless CMS is where the CMS is decoupled from the rest of the web development platform. In other words, the CMS is separate to the database or repository where all the content is kept. Confused? Well read on and we'll try and lay this out in plain english.

What is a CMS?

A Content Management System is simply a platform that allows the average person to log onto a website and make changes to it; without needing to be an expert in HTML and CSS. Find out more about Content Management Systems.

How is website content stored?

Website content is essentially stored in a database or repository. In simple terms, if you think about what goes into a standard web page; you will have the actual text saved somewhere and then elsewhere you will have the images on that page saved. When the page loads, it will pull the text and images from the different sections and put them together how they are meant to look.

So with a normal CMS website, the database and CMS are coupled together in the same web development platform. Whereas, with a Headless CMS, these are decoupled and generally 2 separate platforms.

Why have a Headless CMS?

The biggest reason to have a Headless CMS is flexibility. By having your website content stored on a different platform to your CMS, you can choose from different CMS's to get the one that suits your needs. You can even have multiple CMS's using the same data so you have different functionality etc for different needs.

In other words, your Headless CMS is simply a database of all your content and you can choose how you want to pull that information and how you want to display it. That means you can pull the same data for your website, your phone app or some type of Internet Of Things (IOT) platform. As you can imagine, this gives you a lot more flexibility and allows you to build functionality that may not even be a thing yet.

Probity Web Marketing uses PlatformOS as our Headless CMS. We then combine this with our very own WaveCMS to manage it.