How does Headless CMS offers Page Management/Builder Capability?

Question

We are using a traditional CMS that also offers API (Rest & GraphQL) to expose content on top of page builder capabilities, I want to understand:

1. How to know if my traditional CMS is also a true Headless CMS?
2. Can a headless CMS offer Page management capability or it can only create the content pieces that can be tagged & exposed via API to multiple channels?
   • If that is the case, then doesn't my front-end logic needs to take care of a lot of things while rendering the page to understand which content will go first & which one last?
   • Wouldn't this create a tight coupling between CMS & Front End (be it in the form of taxonomy)?
3. Is there any real advantage for Content authors in headless CMS as I believe they will lose the drag & drop / WYSWYG features that is common in traditional CMS?

Thanks

Answer 1

1. Your CMS is truly headless only if the content is completely separated from the context it is displayed in, that is, you should be able to change the destination of where the content goes, and have your front end determine where and how to layout the content. If your CMS controls or entirely owns this, it is no longer headless. If you're using contentful, this can be made easier by their JSON responses that come in a very structured order. In this case you are providing some context, but it is not anywhere near a dependency. These responses from the API are editable. So you can easily change this dependent on the destination of the content.

2. Yes it can, Headless CMS's provide enough metadata (ID's Slugs etc.) for you to create variable routing on your web application. Contentful also has the capability to attach SEO information with new content types. Keep in mind, a Page can be a content type that holds other content types. In this sense, your pages should be able to accept generic component objects, which will render a specific layout for each. Then that layout is backed with content from contentful. As far as understanding which goes first, this can be inferred by the structured JSON response that comes from contentful or other headless CMS's. So it isn't much work to layout the order of things correctly. Here is an example from their docs. If your entry is a single entry that contains other types of content, they come in the order that they appear within the headless CMS, which means editors can shift things up and down as they choose.

https://www.contentful.com/developers/docs/references/content-delivery-api/#/reference/entries/entry/get-a-single-entry/console

to put it shortly, yes. You have to do a larger amount of work on the front end to accommodate this, but there are benefits long term. Once you have a suite of content types and layouts, eventually, the editors can become autonomous.

3. The advantage for editors is more of a safety for developers. Because they are locked into only editing content, it is impossible for an editor to make mistakes regarding style, positioning, or responsiveness. They also do not need to learn new technologies if you decide to change the front or backed of your web application. All the editors can see is the content magically appearing on the website. If they want to change the layout of a section, they don't need to contact you for these types of changes, so long as you've implemented that layout for a component. It keeps everything uniform, and allows for teams to effectively manage releases for new content.