Why choose a headless CMS?

Online users are interacting with your brand on an increasing number of channels and devices. A headless CMS enables you to create and distribute content to all of these places from one central system. Experience freedom and flexibility within content creation!

Headless multichannel CMS

A headless content management system has no default front-end system. Instead, it is front-end agnostic, which means that your content is raw and can be published anywhere through any framework. By getting rid of the front-end delivery layer, your CMS is suddenly a content-only data source waiting for a place to deliver the content.

Front-end developers are then free to build as many “heads” as they like, for however many channels they want to serve content to, e.g. websites, apps, kiosks, and smartwatches. To retrieve the content for each channel, the headless content management system responds to API calls.

Welcome to the future of content management!

While enterprises are developing websites, apps, AI-enabled voice assistants, digital displays and more the traditional CMS has failed to keep pace. Especially the reuse of digital content is much easier with a headless CMS. For one simple reason: It is separating content, HTML, and CSS in code.

This gives marketers, editors, and developers the flexibility to adapt content to all different digital platforms and channels. You can create sophisticated content today and future-proof your content business to deliver consistently great content.

What is a headless CMS?

A headless content management system provides an editorial back-end and a content repository. But it does not cater to any channel-specific presentation and delivery. The presentation layer (head) can be any other system, serving any type of channel. All content is delivered via APIs. This makes it easy for developers to support different channels that are not browser-based such as mobile apps or in-store displays. On the other hand, content editors need to be trained to create abstracted, neutral, multi-channel content. Channel-specific previews need to be built by developers.

What is a decoupled CMS?

A decoupled CMS is offering an editorial back-end and a front-end delivery as separate components. Both parts are connected via an API but can be used independently as well. The main difference between a decoupled and a "pure" headless CMS is, that a headless CMS only contains the editorial back-end. Many decoupled CMS products can also be used in a "headless CMS" setup.

Why choose headless CMS?

Marketers, journalists, and developers benefit and gain a competitive advantage while using a headless content management system. The headless CMS architecture enables multi-channel content reuse and simplifies content creation. The main benefits: Channel-neutral content in one single system, with a flexible system architecture for any delivery channel.

What is an API?

API stands for application programming interface, which is a software interface that allows one piece of software to interact with another piece of software. A good API makes it easier to develop an integration between two programs by providing all the building blocks, which are then put together by a developer. Being able to connect digital asset management systems like CUE DAM, internal messaging apps like Slack and planning tools like Trello can have a tremendous impact on journalists’ satisfaction with your tech stack, as well as your organization’s overall efficiency.

The traditional CMS architecture

A traditional content management system (CMS) is where you have one back-end system (where you create your content), which delivers content to one front-end presentation layer (typically your website). This architecture is constant and given.

The traditional CMS architecture was sufficient 15 years ago. Systems like Wordpress are monolithic and include website-rendering of the front-end. But content management has changed within the last years and today you need to be able to deliver your content to your website, social media, smart home devices, podcast platforms, etc.

One way to do this is to have separate backend systems for each channel. But what a cumbersome task to juggle with ten different tools to – basically – publish one piece of content. The easier way is to use a headless CMS or a decoupled CMS.

Take a closer look at CUE

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Multichannel publishing

The headless content management system is the technology that makes multichannel publishing possible on our CUE Publishing Platform. Watch how it works here.

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