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CMS Guide.md

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Concepts

Traditional CMS

Provide an end-to-end solution from editing content to displaying content usually via a theme system.

Pros:

  • Quick to build site using various available themes.
  • Off-the-shelf support for previewing content while editing.
  • High performance in content delivery.

Cons:

  • Front-end implementation is bound to limitations of the theme system.
  • Impossible to separate back-end and front-end concerns (e.g programming language, hosting...) due to its coupled nature.
  • Tricky to add additional security layers to the back-end only.

Headless CMS

Focus only on content editing, providing rich APIs for custom front-end implementation.

Pros:

  • Freedom to pick the right technology for front-end part of the site.
  • Having a single source of truth (data) makes it easy to distribute contents to multiple channels, e.g mobile app, affiliate sites...
  • Easy to add additional security layers to back-end without affecting the front-end.

Cons:

  • Require additional work for content previewing.
  • Ensuring fast and efficient content delivery can be tricky.
  • Sharing authentication session between back-end and front-end is challenging.

Solutions

Content as a Service (CaaS)

On demand content delivering service, e.g prismic.io, contentful

Pros:

  • Zero hassle on maintenance.
  • Minimal back-end work required.

Cons:

  • Design is bound to limitations of the service capabilities.
  • Manage content structure change can be difficult.
  • Potentially high on-going cost.

Self-hosted

Hosting yourself CMS system, e.g Wordpress, Craft

Pros:

  • Freedom to fully customise content models to fit with design.
  • No on-going cost (hosting cost still applied however).
  • Can be configured to be either traditional or headless CMS.

Cons:

  • Required frequent maintenance to stay well performed and secured.

Options

prismic.io Contentful Wordpress
Stability & security Great Great Good
Content flexibility Excellent Good Excellent
Features Great Good Good
Ease of use Great Great Good
Ease of development OK Good Great
Support Good Good Great

prismic.io

One CMS Backend for all your Websites & Apps.

Stability & security Content flexibility Features Ease of use Ease of development Support
Great Excellent Great Great OK Good

prismic.io is packed with features, some of them are fairly unique like ability to schedule releases, A/B testing contents. Its dashboard UI is very well designed and intuitive. Content editing is a breeze. Extensive list of fields type and no restrictions on number of custom types make it's easier to create re-usable set of components to compose web pages.

prismic.io comes with a command line to bootstrap your project, first-class support for NodeJS, React and Angular. High learning curve when querying complex contents though, and modification of content models (structure) after first production released is very challenging however, the proposed solution is finicky at best.

Priority support comes at a higher on-going cost.

Contentful

Contentful is the essential content management infrastructure for projects of any size, with its flexible APIs and global CDN.

Stability & security Content flexibility Features Ease of use Ease of development Support
Great Good Good Great Good Good

Contentful is a mature platform with a well thought-out feature set, its Images API is best in class. Number of field types is somewhat small compared to prismic.io and lacks of repeating fields render composing new pages out of content blocks impossible.

Contentful provide SDKs for a great range of programming languages. Documentations are well written and its RESTful API structure helps easing down the learning curve. Like all other CaaS services, managing content structure change after production in Contentful is a challenge, but their proposed solution is acceptable.

Support scales with on-going cost, ranging from basic ticketing to a dedicated contact and phone support.

Wordpress

WordPress is open source software you can use to create a beautiful website, blog, or app.*

Stability & security Content flexibility Features Ease of use Ease of development Support
Good Excellent Good Good Great Great

Wordpress is arguably one of the most popular CMSs out there, due to its maturity and tremendous amount of support from open source community. Its rich plugins ecosystem helps building site much faster. Overusing plugins can be a major issue, however, as they are the main source of security risks and performance degradation. Configuring Wordpress to a headless CMS will eliminate most of these issues.

Wordpress theme system feels outdated and lacks of modern PHP features. Several efforts (here, here and here) have been made to address this issue, make working with Wordpress a lot more enjoyable.