What Is a Headless CMS?

Expectations for digital experiences only continue to grow. We have gone from Content Management Systems (CMS) to Web Experience Management (WEM), and now to Digital Experience Platforms (DXP). A lot of people hear these different acronyms and are unsure of the differences, but it is critical to understand what each does before you start to consider a new content system.

For retailers around the world, having a dynamic virtual storefront is essential. Especially so during these days of lockdown, when online has been the only way brands can sell. And just like with brick-and-mortar stores, the presentation of products is a key factor in the buying decision. So it makes good sense that brands are looking at the best way to revamp their stores with both a functional and visually appealing frontend.

This year I attended NRF, the National Retail Federation’s annual mega-conference in New York City. If you’ve been to NRF, you know the conference packs the Javits Center to the gills with technology companies hawking their wares to the world’s retailers. But the environment also provides an opportunity to identify trends that will define the retail landscape – and the eCommerce industry – for years to come.

With the release of Content Cloud 10, CoreMedia now natively delivers content in a headless fashion via GraphQL. But what is GraphQL and how exactly is it used to fetch content from CoreMedia? This blog post explains everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask. So, why headless?

For some time, “headless” has been the hottest trend in Content Management Systems (CMS). And for a very good reason. A headless architecture allows enterprises to separate content data from the frontend display, splitting up the frontend and backend, and therefore paving the way for an agile, microservice-based architecture.

It's time for another edition of our ongoing series of recommended reads.

Although we love to share our own ideas on the CoreMedia blog, we'd also like this to be a place to post the thoughts and opinions of other industry leaders - including our partners, customers, and analysts. So, in addition to the guest posts that appear here from time to time, we also like to share links to articles on critical topics in the CMS and DX space. And today's topic is: the headless management of content and commerce.

Salesforce recently released its new Page Designer tool to address a longstanding need for a basic, visual editor- and page-builder app to complement its Commerce Cloud solution. It’s designed to be an easy-to-use, casual editing tool that empowers business teams. And it supports the creation of content elements and pages with branding in a fast and visual way, much like a simple web content management system (CMS).

Over the last few years, CoreMedia Content Cloud has integrated with every major eCommerce system on the market. Some of these are delivered as a bundled product (including Salesforce Commerce Cloud, SAP Commerce Cloud and HCL Commerce) while others are implemented on a project level (including Elastic Path, Magento, Spryker and a variety of homegrown systems).

Migrating to WebSphere Commerce V9The latest version of WebSphere Commerce has been long anticipated. A lot of major architectural changes bring the platform into a new era, but also include a lot of challenges for those updating.

Business today is rife with challenges. With both software and business requirements evolving at an ever-increasing pace, it can often feel like an impossible challenge to remain relevant in this ever-changing landscape. Your existing software solutions, so recently adequate or even state-of-the-art, soon become old and cumbersome.

It’s all about the experienceMost savvy brands and retailers recognize that great content is at the core of every great online experience. That’s true today and it will remain true in the future. But building and delivering consistent, compelling experiences to consumers across multiple channels and devices is more complicated than ever.

Remember when web servers were essentially a metal box with a fixed IP? When web content management meant copy-pasting indecipherable bits of text from the HTML tab in Microsoft Frontpage? And when Amazon’s homepage looked like this in your browser?

In the second episode of our short series about CoreMedia's headless capabilities, we will take a closer look at how to access articles and pictures stored within the content repository from a progressive web app.

CoreMedia Content Cloud features a mature and powerful headless server. Learn from our expert how easy it is for a hybrid like a progressive web app (PWA) for instance to fetch data from CoreMedia's content repository. 

In the third episode of our short series about CoreMedia Headless, we take a closer look at how to retrieve content from the CoreMedie repository. Finally, we take a look at how to leverage CoreMedia Headless in an e-commerce scenario.

For security reasons, you might not want to expose your full GraphQL API to the internet. Instead, you might want to restrict your client's access to a limited set of queries. Persistent queries provide a convenient and secure solution for this problem

This lesson starts with a story.Imagine you work for a medium-sized manufacturer. Your order pipeline is filled to the brim and your production department is running at full capacity for the current year. Great. There’s just one problem: When it comes to digitizing key business processes and models, your company is lagging far behind the competition, especially in the critical area of eCommerce. Problem detected!

Composable commerce is an oft-used term that has gained significant traction in the e-commerce industry in recent years. It is seen as the next evolution of the traditional monolithic e-commerce platform model, which has dominated the industry for over a decade. The term "composable commerce" refers to a new approach that enables businesses to leverage a flexible set of services, applications, and microservices that can be easily combined, configured, and reconfigured as needed to meet their specific business requirements.

Are you hoping to see better returns from your digital investment? To do that, let’s consider the biggest challenges facing companies, in order to find out how the right CMS can enable you to create seamless online customer experiences.