🌐 Around the headless landscape : Introduction

Hey !!!, Glad to see you there, as you might have guessed this is sort of a little introduction blog for a blog series that i started called Around the Headless landscape

In this series, we'll embark on a little adventure (whoo) where we'll have a look around all the majour headless cms providers and play with them to see how we can integrate them into our applications (next.js for me)

So take out your laptops, strap on your seatbelts and get ready, because this one is going to be a lot more fun than you'd expect...

But wait... If you're new around headless CMS space, Don’t worry i’ve got you covered 🙃, lets first quickly go over Some basic stuff

So what even is a headless CMS ?, well good question

Let's say our friend edward over here finally found the treasure, now after all these year's of being a space cowboy, he finally want's to settle down & with all that money he want's to start his own ship business (fair enough ig 🤷‍♂️)

Now for obvious purposes edward also want's to have a website for his business, now edward is a smart kid in his early day's he had learned a lot about computer science and to no ones surprise has awesome frontend skills

but unfortunately he ain't no good with backend stuff, just making api call's and that's all he know's about backend

Now in this situation edward can easily levrage some traditional content management system (CMS) like wordpress. He can just, find a suitable theme, slap on some cool plugins, configure some stuff and tada he's got a fully functional website

except there's a teeny-tiny problem here, edward's partner faye doesn't really like the look and feel of wordpress because of multiple reasons the biggest of which is limited customisability to the frontend

now here's the main

Problem with Traditional CMS

you see when using traditional CMS you're (generally) locked in with a particular set of frontend and backend with little to no wiggle room at all, e.g. just like in the case with Wordpress the flexibility with frontend is kinda limited

and that's where a

Headless CMS Come's In

The whole point of a headless CMS is to have a seprate backend that act's as a single source of truth for all your content which is accessible via some api call's

This way you can have whatever frontend you want to or even better display the same content on various platform via native apps

So now all edward has to do now is to swap out wordpress with a headless cms provider for backend and he's pretty much good with any frontend that suit's him well

💡 TL;DR

A headless CMS is one seprate backend that act's as a single source of truth for all your content which is accessible via some api call's as compared to a traditional CMS where everything is coupled together

And that is pretty much as you'd need to know about a headless cms as long as you are familiar with frontend and making some api call's

I will be using JavaScript (TypeScript) for the most part, but please feel free to switch that around however you see fit, after all the logic is going to be the same as always

and that wrap's up this blog, well have a much more in depth look at every single headless provider in the further episodes of the series until then

Please let me know if you have any questions in the comments and

Thank you very much for reading this blog, hope to see you in the next one ✌️