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A Clueless Newbie's Guide to Headless CMS & the Jamstack

Sam Tanoak Sycamore on March 02, 2021

As a web developer, I'm always on the hunt for the latest and greatest ways to improve my workflow and deliver a superior product. When I first go...
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Joshua Clark

Sam! This is an excellent article. I learned something new today, the definition of JAMstack, thanks for the simple explanation. My eyes were recently opened to the incredible world of using headless CMS when I set up my blog with Ghost, it's easy to set up and super cheap, for less than $5 a month I can serve it up on a Digital Ocean Droplet and host it on Netlify for free. It really makes me re-think web development!

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Artem

Used Strapi on several occasions and have to say it's pretty good to handle backend for you.

As of opposite, Sanity.io which seems also rather popular feels absolutely unfriendly and hard to understand. If you are not a seasoned dev it's gonna chew you up and, you know, split... It has a beautiful studio though.

I'm gonna check that one you mentioned, Prismic, let's see what it can.

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Henrik Wirth

Nice article. I'd add WordPress as a headless CMS through WPGraphQL as an option.

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hamed pakdaman

"Couldn't stand the thought of returning to monolithic index.php" — that sentence is basically my whole 2021. One thing worth adding for other newbies reading: headless/Jamstack isn't the only escape from WP's DX. There are now PHP CMSes with React admins (I use UnfoldCMS, which is Laravel + a React/shadcn dashboard), so you keep the modern component workflow without wiring up a separate frontend + CMS + build pipeline. For a portfolio site especially, that's less moving parts than a full Jamstack setup. Good clear intro for people just crossing this bridge.

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Sasidharan

Nice article 👍

Checkout🚀 lagandlog.com

Fully built on JamStack ✨using Gatsby and StrapiCMS.

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Moinul Moin

Cool! How did you do that?

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Sasidharan • Edited

Thanks, man, it has a lot of bugs underneath, lol - WIP

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Kiran Iyer

Thanks for writing this amazing article, Sam! I had a dozen questions about headless CMS and now I got those answers. Cheers!

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Tomer Ben David

So monolythic sounds great for solo or non enterprise development due to simplicity

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Alex Trost

Loved this article, Sam! You really broke down the pros and cons fairly and thoroughly. Thanks for writing it!

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Mary Olive

Great article! Thanks for the clarity. :)