Headless CMSs came about because it is hard to build a single platform that content writers like using and software developers like maintaining. A balanced attempt to please both groups always ends up sacrificing user experience. This difficulty arises because the editorial and product development processes are entirely different models. Combining these two processes into a single value chain creates a monolith business and software system that is hard to extend and has longer release cycles. The solution lies in separating the processes into two parts:

• A backend for storage, manipulation, and security of content.
• One or more frontend (s) for content generation and display.

Both parts need software developers, but they support different process flows. Software developers can split themselves into three teams for content - content-ops, content-API, and content tools. Each team can then focus on supporting different parts of the business and user personas. The content-ops team can focus on aggregation, storage, and analytics. The API team builds a mechanism for secure and efficient content retrieval. The content-tools Team supports content writers and the editorial process tools. There can be more teams to support separate form factors such as web, mobile, AR/VR, and so on.

Backend Components

The "headless" part of the architecture consists of the content-ops and API Teams that manage the following.

Inward Integrations / Sources

Inward integrations can be from a variety of sources, such as the following. The source adapters would conform to an Ingestion spec, and developers implement them as plugins.

• Other CMS
• E-commerce sites like Shopify
• News feeds

APIs

Developers build the APIs around the content domain. A simple domain would be as follows. Business functions may split these APIs depending on their responsibility. For example, there may be a Post API with read-only attributes while another manages visibility rules.

• Posts
• Pages
• Tags
• Authors
• Subscriptions
• Site Analytics
• Search

Outward Integrations

The aggregated data can be made available for external systems using the following.

• Webhooks
• Lambda / serverless functions: invoked with
• Forms

Frontend Components

The part that makes the CMS headless is that the content tools and presentation layer are independent of the CMS backend.

Content Tools

• Page creation tools are composable with posts, reusable components, and widgets.
• Typically, editors support composition, reviews, corrections, and other editorial flows.

Presentation Apps

Presentation apps on the web or mobile present additional capabilities, such as

• Archives
• Sitemap
• SEO
• Open Graph meta-data

Integrated Capabilities

A single platform that follows the high-level architecture can provide both backend and optional frontend capabilities. Some well-known examples are Contentful, Adobe Experience Manager, ContentStack, Strapi, and Storyblok.