The Rise of Headless Content Management Systems

Introduction

In recent years, the way we create and publish content online has undergone a significant transformation. This shift has also impacted how we build content-rich digital products. Traditionally, content creation, authoring, and presentation were tightly coupled in a monolithic system. However, with the advent of headless content management systems (CMS), this is no longer the case.

What is a Headless CMS?

A headless CMS is a content capturing platform that exists solely to capture and manage content. It does not have an end-user experience layer and instead exposes content through an API. This allows developers to use a different tech stack to build the end-user experience.

The Need for a Headless CMS

Ten years ago, all our content was centered around our marketing website. Today, there are numerous applications with the same content. We need a central source of truth to capture that content and distribute it to various channels. A headless CMS makes sense for where the industry is going and how today’s content is generally produced and consumed.

How Does a Headless CMS Work?

In a traditional monolithic system, the backbone was the “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) editor. However, with a headless CMS, we have no idea what the presentation layer will look like. That’s platform-specific, and company branding, guidelines, or design systems would help us determine based on the use case.

The Benefits of a Headless CMS

A headless CMS architecture isn’t just for developers. By supporting composable content, it improves workflows for editors, marketers, and anyone else who creates, updates, and manages content. Composable content enables us to describe the schema of a specific building block of content, making it reusable across any presentation layer.

Introducing Contentful and Gatsby

Contentful is a composable content platform that we’ll use as our headless CMS solution. Gatsby is a React-based SSG framework that quickly evolved to become one of the go-to developer platforms for building fast, secure websites. Its proprietary data layer makes integrating content from various APIs or platforms a breeze.

Tutorial: Using Gatsby and Contentful to Build a Headless CMS

To get started, let’s set up a new account on Contentful and define our content model.

npm install -g contentful-cli
contentful login
contentful space create --name my-space

We’ll then use the Gatsby starter project to import some dummy data and create a new site.

npx gatsby new my-site https://github.com/contentful/gatsby-starter-contentful.git
cd my-site
npm run develop

Next, we’ll explore how to define our content model in Contentful and integrate it with our Gatsby site.

• Define content types and fields in Contentful
• Create content entries and publish them
• Use the Contentful API to fetch content in our Gatsby site
• Render content using Gatsby’s built-in components

Stay tuned for the next part of this tutorial, where we’ll dive deeper into building a headless CMS with Contentful and Gatsby.