As the VP of Development at Ingeniux, Nathan knows a lot about different technical architectures, including headless content management (CMS). In this webinar on the Content Wrangler, Nathan explains what headless CMS is, how it works, along with some benefits and challenges to the approach. Read on for a summary of his presentation. 

The Evolution of Customer Experience 

The customer experience is evolving all the time. We've moved from a purely physical (offline) experience to primarily digital, and the number of digital channels is constantly growing. You get and access content from multiple channels, including downloadable PDFs, websites, knowledge bases, chatbots, voice, and more.  

The problem with multiple channels is having consistent content across all these channels – the right answers or information, the current version. If you don't have a way to create content once and push it into different channels, you will continue to manually update each channel as the content changes, often leading to inconsistencies across those channels. 

From an administration perspective, employees are constantly struggling with content silos and getting this information to the right channels at the right time. Authoring and editing are complex, trying to keep channels up to date. 

Enter Headless Content Management 

One of the most significant advancements across the CMS platform space is API-delivered content or headless content management. Eggen sees headless as a feature of a content management platform rather than a distinct solution. There are many CMS that provide headless capabilities alongside other types of content delivery, such as static HTML or dynamic HTML. 

Headless content management is the ability to deliver content to websites and other channels via a RESTful content API. In addition, most headless-only solutions only provide backend content management capabilities – it has no knowledge or ability to create front-end experiences. Instead, it offers content authoring, governance, taxonomy, classification, and manipulating and curating content for various channels. 

Features of a Headless CMS 

Eggen walked through some of the key features of headless content management: 

• Content Authoring and Editing – These features are no different than what you would have in a traditional CMS or a CCMS. The big aspect is preparation and planning. The more work you do defining your content models, Eggen said, the more reuse you have. 
• Content Workflow and Governance: Functionality to enable content review and approval, as well as other governance features (accessibility, grammar, linking, etc.). 
• Enterprise Search and Discovery: For people who don't like to browse, a powerful search experience is critical to helping them find the correct information. 

• Content Repository and DAM: You'll also have assets, such as imagery, videos, audio, and documents, that you'll want to include in your content repository, and a headless solution should provide the ability to manage these assets in step with text-based content. 
• Omnichannel Delivery: Dynamic, Static, API – A pure headless CMS only offers API-based content delivery, but some headless solutions are more of a hybrid offering and include other approaches to delivering content.  

The reason you want to plan your content authoring regardless of output format is so you can get reusable content. When creating content, you are thinking about your products, services, and tasks, but you really want to be thinking about how to deliver this content to different users.  

"So, is it documentation? Is training? What can be shared between those two activities? Is it marketing material that explains or promotes the benefits of a feature that you also need to document and need to provide instructional content? That's a great example of a reusable content scenario. Planning ahead of time and thinking through those types of situations will yield a better outcome." 

Headless Use Cases 

Eggen provided a few examples, including multi-site/multilingual web experiences. If you want to deliver multiple language websites or manage multiple brand websites, and they all have the same products that are branded and white-labeled for individual entities, headless content management can feed a reusable set of content that's then branded at the time of delivery in a single page app  

Other examples include managing content for mobile apps, where developers can update content without rebuilding or recompiling their applications every time the content needs to change. Likewise, managing content for chatbots or web applications outside these experiences allows you to quickly update the content without changing the front-end experience. And then, there are IoT applications, such as kiosks or voice-enabled devices, that need access to the same content used in other channels and experiences. 

Advantages and Challenges of Headless CMS 

There are many benefits of a headless CMS solution, as Eggen explained: 

In a headless architecture, your front end obscures its content source, so people can't see what you are using on the backend. You're also not deploying a heavy web experience platform into your public-facing experience; instead, a lightweight website or single-page application makes calls into the backend to retrieve the content it needs. 

This separation helps with performance. You don't have databases and complex deployment infrastructure. Instead, you have text-based content in JSON or XML format, highly cacheable, high performance, and small data models. 

And that, Eggen said, goes right into availability. There are fewer moving parts, and a much higher degree of performance means you have a lower chance of having a complex IT environment that's difficult to manage or scale out. This also goes to multi-site management as well.  

Finally, there are upgrades. Eggen said this isn't something many people highlight but because you are not implementing a front-end experience on top of a templating system (and most CMS have their own way of templating and delivering websites). By using headless technology, you are in control of the templating and delivery which means you won't have to deal with front-end issues when you update your authoring system. The two are separate, increasing agility and potentially reducing costs. 

There are also some considerations or challenges. For example, content silos are a problem with headless. Suppose there are silos of content across the organization. It can be challenging to bring that content together because it's formatted differently and has a different taxonomy or metadata model. 

Headless, by default, doesn't provide a way to view your content in presentation mode (I.e., no preview). Unfortunately, this means it's harder to see how the front-end experience looks as you build your experience.  

It's the same for DevOps – if you have no internal support for tooling, development, and operations, builds, deployments, and IT operations, headless can be a big challenge.  

"If you're a marketing or a technical authoring person who has no internal support for tooling and development operations, builds, deployments, IT operations. Headless may actually be more challenging for you unless you can get a coalition of people to take that API and do something with it. So, a lot of times where there's a separation between content production, content governance, content authoring, and the delivery side, you want to be careful to make sure that you have the resourcing or the support to finish and deploy your final project into some technology stack that you may not have direct control over." 

From Headless to Hybrid 

According to Eggen, five or six popular products call themselves headless first. They only do headless content management. But many other CMS have added headless delivery as an option to their platforms. Ingeniux is one of these CMS platforms, Eggen said. Headless was exciting when it first came out, but it's not a different way of authoring or managing its content – it's a different way of deploying it.  

"And I really see this as just another deployment choice. So, as long as your CMS can support structured content and can support all those other features I mentioned, like digital asset management, governance, Enterprise Search, etc., you can absolutely, in almost all cases, also deliver API-based content to an application, to a mobile app, to an IoT experience that you might be adding on to your business. We call those systems that support multiple delivery types hybrid CMS." 

At the end of the presentation, Eggen performed a demo showing how headless works in the Ingeniux CMS. Watch the replay above to hear more details of his talk and see the demo. There was also a great conversation between Scott Abel and Eggen that's worth listening to.