Headless CMS

A lot of professionals get stuck in a configuration where they combine a React(-like) library with WordPress as a headless CMS.

You want the customizability of an in-house CMS without the associated costs and risks? Headless content management can bring you close to this dream. Building your own CMS is a dangerous journey you do not need to make anymore. Your developer resources are freed up and can now be fully invested in features that are directly related to your core business.

Contentful is a big player in the headless CMS market and will probably continue to be one for a while. Nonetheless, there are some pain points when working with Contentful, such as SDK issues and REST, and a growing number of developers are looking for alternatives. In this article, I want to compare working with Contentful's REST API and Hygraph's GraphQL API and show advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches.

Headless Content Management Systems have grown big time in the recent years and are enjoying immense popularity. The really big difference to a conventional CMS is the missing front-end, which certainly opens up a great set of possibilities. For developers, the headless CMS provides an API for the stored content. For editors, the CMS provides great tooling to manage all their content. Your front-end applications then fetch data from this API and displays it.

Using Wordpress for your production site can be quite a challenge. The more plugins you integrate, the less maintainable your code gets. The content editing is kind of clunky and feels just unnatural. Hacky code becomes your daily business.

One year after GraphQL was open sourced, the community and ecosystem around this technology is growing rapidly. The GraphQL project left the stage of technical preview and the GraphQL website was relaunched with a shiny new design. In mid-September, GitHub announced their new GraphQL-API, which is huge news for the growing GraphQL community.