Are you building a new website or app? Then you must be asking what tech stack is the best choice for your new project.

Nowadays they are some interesting options out there in the realm of open-source CMS systems, due to their headless nature. In order to deliver content we use Content Management Systems, and while the term CMS has been around for a while, what is headless CMS? It means  it lacks or can lack a front-end, so basically a headless CMS consists in a backend system and an application program interface or API (REST or GraphQL) that allows content to be distributed and printed on the front-end of the website or app using the front-end technologies that you find more practical.

In recent years one of the stars in the world of headless CMS is Strapi, an open-source, Node.js based CMS that provides a backend powerful to scale and design entities and objects in your database that can later be integrated with ease to the views. Strapi has been the choice of NASA, ASOS, Walmart, IBM among others that decided to use this technology.

The Headless approach in conjunction with static website generators like Gatsby.JS allows us to deliver blazing-fast websites by maintaining the benefits of building on top of a CMS.

One of the top features of Strapi is that its documentation auto-generates, it is very easy to integrate with other frameworks and yes, there are a series of plugins available. And as if this was not enough: community — one of the most important factors of success of a CMS is its community support. During the last years, Strapi has become more popular due to its amazing features, so the community has adopted it with confidence.

Some of the characteristics of Strapi are:

• Good community (lots of stars and not that many issues on Github)
• Open Source
• 100% built with Javascript
• Supports SQL, Mongo DB or Postgres
• It supports GraphQL.

There are other options out there, like Butter CMS, CoreMedia, Contentful, Storyblok, Netlify, Magnolia. But Strapi is simply beating them all due to its self-hosted nature, flexibility and modularity. It is promoted as “the best alternative to WordPress”, and I really think that Strapi can dispute WordPress its place as it has built-in functionalities that WordPress only can have if you add plugins or tons of custom code to transform it into a proper CMS. In Strapi these are core functionalities that come right out of the box, like creating a custom content type and adding custom fields to it… just a few clicks ahead without having to worry about plugin updates or that the free plugin you have been using for the last decade suddenly becomes “premium”, as it happened with WordPress’s Types.

So if you are planning to launch a new project, don’t hesitate to consider going headless and using the power of Strapi to structure and manage your project.

Not necessarily your project or website needs to be built using the headless approach. A great majority of companies rely on the natural front-end that CMS comes with, like Drupal, WordPress or Joomla, they all have their own template engine, powered with PHP and Twig which when it is correctly configured can also deliver a good User experience.

Why Go Headless?

One of the main reasons for choosing a headless CMS is that you build it with only the features you need and increasing the flexibility to produce the best user experience for your clients. Headless E-commerce allows you to deliver unique designs flows to stand out in the crowd, better online shopping experiences, among other benefits. On the technical side, you can use React, Vue, Angular or Polymer to build a SPA on top of a headless CMS API, the possibilities are endless. At Curzon PR we love to advise our clients about the best technologies to empower their digital projects.

Finding a balance between scalability, timeliness and budget is fundamental to make the right tech stack choice.

Curzon PR is a London-based PR firm working with clients globally. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact our Business Development Team [email protected]