What is Headless CMS and why should you care? - Kristoffer Fredriksson

The term Headless CMS or Decoupled CMS is used more and more frequently. But what does it mean and why should you bother? And what about that name? Going headless is about so much more than just the CMS.
Once you gain full control over a web project by making it headless there are several opportunities that opens up. Using modern CSS or creating a progressive web app becomes so much easier. You can also start preparing your project for virtual assistants without piling on added complexity.
Kristoffer will share insights he's gained over the last three years of working in several headless projects. You will learn how a basic headless set-up should work and most importantly why it will be worth your time.
Kristoffer Fredriksson has worked with interactive media professionally since 1999. He's been at the forefront of the digital media revolution since then. He's currently working as Concept Developer at 24HR Malmö.
__________________________
Foo Café is an independent and physical meeting place for people of all backgrounds and expertise within the IT-industry. Foo Café is aimed at those interested in sharing and learning.
Born out of the desire to create a year round conference like atmosphere, Foo Café is THE place for planned and spontaneous meetings of all sizes and interests within the IT arena.
Enjoy a coffee or a cold beer, along with light pub fare, and engage with other like minded individuals interested in sharing their knowledge and learning from one another. Foo Café is sourced by individuals, small, medium and goliath-sized enterprises, as well as entrepreneurs. Awaiting you, after stepping over the Foo Café threshold, is a space that is recruitment and product placement safe!
We look forward to igniting inspiration and creativity year round to patrons of Foo Café.

[@rv4tyler]

Just realizing I am almost 5 years late to this party. Nice presentation.

[@KristofferYiFredriksson]

I aim to please. I'm glad to see that even the old legacy cms are now trying to pivot to headless. I wouldn't recommend any of them though. There is no reason to do anything but OpenSource self hosted stuff.

[@cmdaltctr]

Ha! Thank you sir! FINALLY I understood what is headless CMS. I would listen to his other presentations if there is any. Great speaker.

[@SanjanaLaddha]

Such good explanation, love the effort of the presenter with the slides

[@flaviusoxford]

brillant. Technical talk, yet accessible to non-tech folks, like myself, but who need to work with and understand CMS. Kristoffer does deserve to be on a TED Talk :)

[@kristofferfredriksson7686]

I wish...

[@HungNguyen-ep7cq]

@@kristofferfredriksson7686 I really like your presentation, the way you approach such a technical subject in layman terms. Simple yet informative slides as well.

[@kristofferfredriksson7686]

@@HungNguyen-ep7cq Thank you for your kind words.

[@akhilmittal2018]

Great presentation. Amazing simplification of the subject. I still believe the topic is debatable but the way you presented is wonderful!

[@kristofferfredriksson7686]

Thank you for your kind words. There's another presentation on the way where I tackle AI and Machine Learning. I hope you will find it just as enjoyable.

[@Moshie71]

Great presentation 🎉

[@KristofferYiFredriksson]

Thank you, glad you enjoyed it.

[@intrax2tv]

If real life ever was that simple! CSS and grids have longtime been around to achieve this, now everyone will build it's own api and problems will start all over again. Thanks for your presentation though!

[@kristofferfredriksson7686]

Heh, I guess I should have added the famous xkcd strip about standards... xkcd.com/927/

[@liu-river]

Presenter - 'let me tell you about the village of secrets' Guy on the right - casually sipping away his beer

[@DriftJunkie]

Where is the talk he mentions at 26:35 ?

[@jean-baptistelasselle4562]

Excellent presentation, mind the TED. :)

[@kristofferfredriksson7686]

Thank you! I really appreciate your comment.

[@korben4340]

"WYSIWIG is a lie! Your content should shine without building new templates!" Thanks a lot Kristoffer, on point! Your www history from naked to CMS bloat to full front-end control by API diagrams is excellent and very very helpful. As are all your slides really, pls consider sharing or publishing them as a brief tutorial if you have the time and don't mind. And hope you don't mind checking these ? re. your headless Page Builder thing (25:30) :) Is the Page Builder custom built in-house? When hooking into WordPress isn't it limited to how open WP's API happen to be? The 10 minute front page grid templating f.ex, is that enabled by flexibility of WPs templating engine and are you also calling some plugins to do that? Are there any cases where you have to switch or patch the backend because there just aren't any API doors open? Why even keep WP around as a light content and templating layer, is it due to its history and thereby access to all the APIs in the world one may need? Or are there other requirements it fulfills in terms of hosting, scalability, caching...? thanks! /// - the Jen Simmons CSS magician talk (27:27, "Real Art Direction on the Web") is at kzbin.info/www/bejne/a4uanYaJgtyFndE ,looking fw to that

[@kristofferfredriksson7686]

Thanks for your kind words. I will try and record a white board session with our tech lead and get into exactly how our headless WordPress combo is set up. I'll notify you on here if/when it's done. The PageBuilder I'm showing in the presentation was an in-house PoC. We've since moved on to a heavily modified WPBakery and are currently using Gutenberg.

[@korben4340]

​@@kristofferfredriksson7686 tjena, any follow up would be fab bonus but don't stress it, your pointers got me started already and led to more material on server vs. client rendering and builds and I'm leaving WP as backend for new sites anyway. WPBakery looks ace though, $45 per site fair price for a core tool for agencies like yours (but not for me). Haven't tried Gutenberg yet, the 1949 1-star reviews on wordpress.org/plugins/gutenberg is hilarious though (503 5-stars atm, seems like usual change crunch phase)

[@charlieguiang8021]

Budget wise and time wise. Which is more faster to deploy? A wordpress site or this headless cms system? Clients really dont care about how the backend or how it all works, What they care about are leads and marketing. If the budget spent cannot justify the sales, thats gonna be a problem.

[@randalhollis7607]

Clients who are managing multiple end-points and integrations REALLY care about the backend. Imagine the technical debt of managing multiple local and international sites, e-commerce, multiple apps, CRM, tech support, customer accounts, centralized logins, social media, DAM, sales, kiosks, etc. Not everyone will benefit from headless architecture, start-ups and small businesses will always keep it messy and scrappy!

[@larryvelezbx]

If I wanted to explore which headless CMS' can replace our current Drupal system - any recommendations on where to start?

[@kristofferfredriksson7686]

I would begin by looking into decoupling Drupal. If you're happy with how it works in for the editors then there's no major reason to change to one of the new Headless CMSes out there. We've had great success with decoupling WordPress but that's because we have a lot of experience with WordPress. I'm always a bit weary about new CMSes. They're really complicated things to build so I think going for one of the bigger (and older) open source options is a valid move. AS long as the developers know how to get the content as data (which is the term we used for headless before we realised there was another term) you should be fine.

[@denniszenanywhere]

Kristoffer Fredriksson if you had a chance to start a blog from scratch, would you still use Wordpress? I am asking because I see some of the Wordpress sites I am managing and they’re really slow using lighthouse audit. If we go headless with Wordpress, would it just be a compromise and it would have been far better to just use Hugo, gatsby or other static site generators?

[@kristofferfredriksson7686]

@@denniszenanywhere I hate to gives this answer but it's the most honest one: it depends. Is it "just" a blog, for a person? Then I would definitely try something else. On the other hand, does the person running the blog have experience with WP and feel familiar with it? Then maybe WP. IS there need for a hierarchy of editors, writers etc? Then make sure the alternative supports that. Some of the reasons for us to use WP for our clients is that they have staff that know and love WP. That we know WP has an active community, that there aren't any monthly fees, that we know WP inside and out. But, none of the plug and play plug-ins will work out of the box. You'll have to handle them on the front end. We use both WP-Bakery and Hutenberg headless and there is extra work involved in getting them up and running. If I were to start a blog just for myself where I would do classic blogg stuff I would personally go for one of the new static generators though. I hope this helps.

[@denniszenanywhere]

@@kristofferfredriksson7686 I truly appreciate this insight. I am used to an "it depends" answer. But I also failed to mention a couple of things. If I understand correctly, Contentful works like WP. I actually built a Gatsby blog using Contentful. Both seem to work on their own but when deployed to Netlify, I get a common error "Build script returned non-zero exit code: 1". Have not solved this yet, so I cannot actually see how I can use Contentful if won't even deploy on Netlify. Still, I see the GUI and multiple author. Isn't it a good alternative WP? However, Contentful is pricey if it's more than one account is used. www.contentful.com/developers/docs/concepts/roles-permissions/#how-roles-and-permissions-work

[@kristofferfredriksson7686]

@@denniszenanywhere Me and a colleague have a joke "Everyone should build a CMS". For a while it felt like we were building custom CMSes for every other client. Then we settled on WP back in late 2009. There were loads of new CMSes coming out at that time. Then things settled down and WP grew. Now we're in a new cycle of experimental CMSes and our clients are to big to bet the farm on something that might go belly up in a year. I think the dust will settle in 2022 and I don't think the subscription model will work until a big player has established itself. No (big)client want's to entrust their public facing platform to a bunch of people in a shed any more. (Like they used to do with us)