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Hari Krishnan
Hari Krishnan

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What is a headless CMS ?

How a traditional CMS will work ?

CMS is content management system. A simple example is a blog. Wordpress is considered to be a traditional CMS, which developers use to publish their content online via websites or web app's.

How content is created or modified in a traditional CMS like Wordpress ?

In Wordpress, we are provided with a dashboard from where we can create, update or remove content. If you need any content to be modified or the User interface to be modified, you will have to either modify in the dashboard or code in the native language from which the CMS was built (php for example).

In a traditional CMS, both the front-end and the api required for the CMS to function are tightly coupled in the server side.

How a headless CMS is different

There is no front-end in a headless CMS. It doesn't care about how you display the content to the user. It will just expose the api which can be consumed by front-end applications written in any language or framework. The api will provide the content to be displayed to the user, let it both a normal website or a web app.

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One such example of an headless CMS is given below :

Prismic

Prismic is yet another famous headless CMS trusted by leading tech giants. Prismic basically has two things :

1. Writing room :

Writing room where content managers work. It's basically a web application similar to wordpress admin dashboard.

2. API and content backend

This is the place where the content is stored. Developers will query the api in order to fetch the content.

Main advantage of using Prismic

Developers can use their own known framework to build the application or website.

There is no server side infrastructure required to maintain the backend of the application, prismic takes care of the server infrastructure.

All you have to do is create content in the writing room, then prismic gives you the api, which can be easily integrated with the front-end.

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