What I Got Wrong About The Headless CMS

Innovation What I Got Wrong About The Headless CMS Josh Koenig Forbes Councils Member Forbes Technology Council COUNCIL POST Expertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based) Jun 17, 2022, 08:00am EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Josh Koenig is a Co-Founder of Pantheon, a platform for extraordinary websites .

He has been making the internet since 1996. getty Eight years ago, I co-hosted a lively meetup of the San Francisco Drupal Users Group. The topic was ” Headless Drupal: Working Code and Call to Action .

” It had the feel of the start of something—the kind of buzz that gives Silicon Valley its magic. In the years that followed, I presented at DrupalCon and several WordCamp events, helping popularize this bold and different approach to the role of the content management system (CMS). It’s time for me to admit that I was wrong.

I wasn’t wrong in calling it an important trend. Headless CMS is only continuing to pick up steam. The problem is that I was focused on the CMS in the first place, instead of the front end.

The past decade has seen a sea change in how software interfaces are built—a trend that’s already driving the next generation of the web. Focusing on the back end was, in hindsight, a mistake. So, to everyone who followed my lead, I apologize.

We missed the forest for the trees, but now it’s time to lift up our eyes. We need to take a real look at what’s going on. It’s The User Experience, Stupid The core web stack (HTML, CSS and Javascript) is finally delivering on the original vision of Java: write-once deploy-anywhere apps.

And it’s awesome . MORE FOR YOU Google Issues Warning For 2 Billion Chrome Users Forget The MacBook Pro, Apple Has Bigger Plans Google Discounts Pixel 6, Nest & Pixel Buds In Limited-Time Sale Event Right now, I’m typing into Google Docs, listening to Spotify and occasionally pausing to respond to Slack—a relatable workflow. But did you know that all these are web experiences? Browsers are now full application runtimes, embeddable in every desktop and mobile OS.

In fact, Google Chrome is even available as an OS (on Chromebooks). This is a revolution, and developers who are on top of these possibilities are busy rewiring what users expect. That’s what matters.

There’s important work to be done making powerful, effective and easily adoptable free and open-source tools for managing content work in this new context. But we do ourselves a disservice if we lose sight of this bigger picture. Digital Experiences Are User Experiences (And Web Experiences) In my opinion, the discourse around “digital experiences” is, well, annoying.

It’s unhelpfully vague and often part of a handwavy pitch aimed at executives who are generationally removed from the digital natives they’re attempting to engage. But if you get down to brass tacks, the web toolchain is how these get delivered. Regardless of device (desktop, mobile or toaster ) or context (browser, email, social media or native app), the experience will probably be rendered from HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

The web is increasingly the universal and open language of user experience, supported by every major tech giant, whether that’s Facebook (React), Google (Chrome) or Microsoft (NPM via GitHub). They’re all inextricably linked to some part of the open web toolchain, which bodes well for continued improvement and competitive innovation. Toward A Coherent Vision Of Composability So, how does this play out? What does “good” look like in three to five years? Here’s my prediction.

Atomic Design tools will continue improving and will be integrated as a source of truth for any user experience delivered via the web stack. There will be an equivalent to Twitter Bootstrap, except delivered via Storybook (or similar), and it will catch fire. Design systems will be foundational for most projects.

These component libraries will feed downstream software that nondevelopers use to assemble and configure components into coherent experiences (e. g. , webpages, app screens and email cadences).

This is the role that today’s CMSs are building into—more of a composition layer than a form-fill content store. Given that, the “headless” requirement can be a red herring. Without a great UI for this composition work, the system will fail.

This is where many headless projects hit the wall: Short-changing the user experience of this content administrator is a huge risk. The winning formula will deliver a near-WYSIWYG admin experience by reusing the same components for administrative users and public web experience visitors. It will also encompass the operational processes to update and extend the component library over time.

Making The Internet With The Internet The tools we use to make the internet are increasingly also available via the internet, whether that’s coding, working on a design or crafting the content. The fact that we can do all the work online lets us break down silos and provides tremendous efficiencies. In the old days, designers would create comps in Photoshop and send those files to developers, who would implement webpage templates and some kind of CMS, and that would be thrown over the wall to marketers to start populating the actual content.

Each of these handoffs was clunky, fraught with sometimes tense and always time-consuming back-and-forths. Today, teams can collaborate in real time (or reasonably close), whether that’s looking at prototypes in Figma, reviewing a proposed change to the development functionality in a feature branch or previewing a new landing page in the CMS before it goes live. The ability to use an interoperable chain of technology throughout this process is a game-changer in terms of what’s possible.

Imagine a developer and designer literally being “on the same page” as they put the finishing touches on the new homepage hero experience. They bring their colleague from the campaign team in to add the final message and send a link in real time to their boss. She’s just walking out of a meeting but can check the link from her phone before giving the green light to launch.

Maybe she catches that, on the latest iPhone, the headline has wrapped and pushed the “call to action” below the fold. Maybe she fixes it and hits the button to take it live herself. That’s what this new era of the internet is about.

It’s so much bigger than shipping content out via JSON instead of HTML. It’s fundamentally a different paradigm for how professionals who build the internet do their work, and I for one can’t wait for it to get here. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives.

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