Headless CMS, Decoupled CMS and Content as a Service (CaaS)

As importance of CMS is increasing when we are talking about RESTful API, Microservices and also using CMS in Application Development. Headless CMS, Decoupled CMS & Content as a Service (CaaS) are newer things and we guess this is a timely article for our readers. Many of these terminologies are quite ill-defined and commonly for practical purposes, for some use cases.

 

Headless CMS, Decoupled CMS and Content as a Service (CaaS)

 

WordPress is example of traditional monolithic CMS where theme actually drives the frontend. That theme is a barrier in development as that is no way flexible but good for some specific purposes only. These CMS gives us a way to store data on MySQL like database, a CRUD UI and obviously ways to display the fetched data.

Decoupled CMS architecture is headless. Here, way to store data on MySQL like database, a CRUD UI is constant but
it is API that is directly related to fetching the data. So the content for the site is accessible via a web-service API, in a RESTful manner.

Obviously WordPress has REST API that that brings that decoupled CMS architecture. But we are talking about those CMS which are Headless CMS, Decoupled CMS etc by default. A headless CMS stores and delivers content. Thats it. Exactly like a light web application with private backend. What will be at frontend that not determined by Headless CMS or Decoupled CMS.

So, at the end, we can develop a mobile application and/or a static website as frontend via API. Main advantages of Headless CMS/Decoupled CMS are :

1. Omnichannel readiness (content created can be repurposed across multiple channels – website, mobile app etc)
2. Flexibility
3. Cloud Scalability
4. Higher System Security

Decoupled CMS is slightly different as micro services are taken in to account. So Decoupled CMS is more advanced. Content as a service is the name for a new type of CMS. A CaaS hosts the content repository in the cloud
from where the content can be fetched via a RESTful API in a well-structured format, such as JSON.

There are some good examples of Headless CMS/Decoupled CMS :

There is examples of CaaS too :

Tagged With headless CMS , caas headless , headless cms as a service