The Big Headless CMS Lie (James Mikrut)

Presented at Next.js Conf 2023.
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The idea of the headless CMS got popular because of its decoupled architecture, separation of concerns, and ability to bring your own frontend. But is that really it? Let's be real. People just wanted to build Next.JS sites with a CMS. Payload is looking at moving from Express to Next's App Router, so we can once again give the "head" back to "headless CMS" without compromising on its API-first nature.

[@MondeSineke]

You can tell this bru has alot of experience. So many similar pain points.

[@JamesMikrut]

thank you! i appreciate it!

[@buzzeins]

Oh yeah, James, if you bring Payload into Next.js natively, I will rewrite all my Remix and Astro applications back into Next.js 14 again.

[@amranmohamed377]

Yh as nextjs 14, i think you need to use Expressjs in nextjs to use payloadcms

[@SeaDraGraphics]

@@amranmohamed377Did you watch the video? xD

[@sergeigarcia186]

Considering the amount of people jumping ship away from Next.js intro astro and remix after the disaster that has been Next 13/14 beta-like releases, I hope this doesn't kill Payload CMS as well by eliminating what made it great to begin with (being headless and agnostic to existing frameworks)

[@king_james_official]

@@sergeigarcia186yo what happened to next? i've been working with c for a few months so what's the controversy?

[@RuChernChong]

Really like the thoughts being put into Payload!

[@bioburden]

Great presentation. I totally feel your pain points as I currently feel them too. Building websites driven by CMSs used to be fun, now with the headless approach, I feel way more stressed when it comes to deployments, I gotta spit types all over the place and can't easily share them, I have this ugly separation of concerns between the front and backends, which was meant to be a developer's dream, but instead that dream has become a nightmare, for content editors and marketing users too. Broken or sub-par previews and ultimately, going headless was pointless as no one else actually needs access to the content from outside of our website. Going all in on Nextjs makes perfect sense. As you say, you get everything in a single repo, shared types, local API which can be utilised with server actions etc. and with REST & GraphQL access to the data should anyone else need it, it sounds ideal to me.

[@dopetag]

If you have a mobile app and a web app, it makes sense to have a headless CMS.

[@bioburden]

@@dopetag in that scenario, yes. However, the majority of people are not in this scenario.

[@lukasmolcic5143]

We've been doing wp + next at a place where I work, and I can see these pain points, the majority of the problems we see are not in building the project, but rather from handling the decoupled setup that we created. My current idea to try to combat this is to go back to just doing custom wp themes, but with twig, htmx and alpine, I get a decent SSR/CSR FE DX with a declarative syntax in a traditionally server first environment, I use twig for separating the components, handling their props and doing templating logic on the server side, on the client side I have alpine for any client side logic and htmx if I want to talk to the server without refreshing the page. Oh, and I just turn on a good caching plugin and I effectively have incremental static regeneration, static assets hosted on cdn with very little setup and maintenance.

[@aleksandrkobelev8868]

Thank you. I thought im only one who struggled with deploy

[@user-is4qt5eo7w]

it sounds like a traditional CMS for next js folks

[@JamesMikrut]

nailed it, will still be headless, but it'll work especially nicely with Next.js

[@samuellembke4565]

I want this!!!! DO IT

[@jeremytenjo]

Do it!

[@maskedvillainai]

I started to learn code 1 year ago. I’m stop trying to get past the cli errors. Maybe one day I’ll start to write code instead of being shunned by it.

[@alvesvaren]

4.0 will probably be like what happened for tanstack, payload becoming a framework agnostic core

[@JamesMikrut]

that's actually shipping with 3.0 already! payload itself is now framework-agnostic, but the admin UI and REST API specifically is built with Next.js

[@alvesvaren]

@@JamesMikrut :O nice!

[@TheAyushSomani]

Since when Channing Tatum become a developer? btw loved the presentation, James.

[@strangertongues]

Thumbs up for a Counter-Strike mention

[@raph151515]

a few hundreds Ks of JS is actually a big thing, most web pages don't serve a 10 MB video, the tech should scale from simple static content to complex UI or big content, a simple page should not load and parse big scripts if it's not necessary, it should be mostly static and use very few CPU resources.

[@avwie132]

It’s hard to take someone seriously when he claims “I’ll say everything to get money”

[@shanefulmer5786]

I think that was a joke

[@skylartkitchen]

That was the joke.

[@O1O1OO1]

Yes a joke, but a joke with serious claims attached.

[@JamesMikrut]

ha, that was a joke for sure. If you ever do something solely to make money, it's probably bad. If you make something because you're passionate about it, it'll probably be good.

[@avwie132]

@@JamesMikrut But what if you're passionate about money?

[@dinoscheidt]

6:51 “if you don’t even build with an API” - exactly - What year is it? … Asking a hypothetical question on stage of a service paddling server-client rendering and coupling like its the 1990s PHP again.

[@hannesrossler5480]

Counterstrike actually works on Mac. I speak from experience.

[@raph151515]

cs2 doesn't

[@hannesrossler5480]

@@raph151515 Right, damn.

[@king_james_official]

@@raph151515what about apple silicon rosetta?

[@JamesMikrut]

i wish that this were so my dude

[@russpalermo]

I think Nuxt does all this already

[@cotyhamilton]

People peddling headless cms tryna tell people the whole thing going to have to go through a build step to see your content updates 😂 and then the build fails 😂

[@cotyhamilton]

This CMS actually looks amazing though, great talk!

[@george_davituri]

serverless ✌️⭐️

[@MickDavies]

100% windows for CS Go. I'd have a beer with this guy

[@JamesMikrut]

give me a beer and i'll drink it with ya

[@mdstudio8139]

I mean they want to piggy back on Next.js but I don't think the direction it is going is necessary great. Headless approach still seems like a better option in the future for exactly the same reasons he told his clients. Those were valid points and still are even if they went over clients heads.

[@fuzzychest]

His point was it was not needed by his clients. It was overkill. Most people will not benefit from extra abstractions in their projects.

[@mdstudio8139]

@@fuzzychest Okay some clients don't need that and only ever want a website, but what if the brand grows and they change their mind. What if with AR tech comes a new way of creating websites, with headless approach you can use the same data everywhere. I think that is super powerful and I am really trying so hard to understand Next decision to move away from that.

[@fuzzychest]

@@mdstudio8139 i used to work for LinkedIn. We always had to think about scale. What ifs. It took me years to stop thinking that way for small businesses. 99% are just fine without any of that and will be for a long time. So long, in fact, by the time they need an update there will be something new to use anyway.

[@lordpain007]

is that new kinda wordpress

[@CoryTheSimmons]

Yes in the sense it's a CMS that you can self-host, but it's written in TypeScript. PayloadCMS is amazing.

[@wchorski]

@@CoryTheSimmons have you messed with KeystoneJS? Looking at Payload it looks like a more modern version and I'm getting a 'grass is greener' feeling watching this

[@ronaldaug8504]

In simple terms, Wordpress refreshes the page while Nextjs does not. :) So, if you could build wordpress without refreshing the page, they are basically the same. Lol.

[@stylishskater92]

@@CoryTheSimmons Why is that a good thing? Lol

[@vinnylozada]

I stopped listening after I heard: "I would say anything to make money".

[@maskedvillainai]

I hate webpage more than a wart that screams only on hot dates

[@user-sw1wq8lh2w]

so just further dig into giving facebook control of our frameworks and services... it's like entirely disregarding vendor lock-in

[@1SquidBoy]

Dude, it's free open source software. Look what happened to terra form. We can just fork react.

[@wchorski]

Facebook? I guess you could say we're also giving everything to Microsoft (Typescript). React is an open sourced library that could be forked and modified down the road. NextJS provides us a nice vantage point with extra tools, but these frameworks are a dime a dozen and one could transfer to Vue, Solid, Remix with a good plan. So the only lock-in is from laziness