The "Create content model" UI is definitely not as polished as the one from Contentful or Kentico Cloud - but it works. You have to actually manage relationship tables yourself, which some people might like.
Unfortunately their only trial is for the smaller plan which is limited to 3 tables, and I don't have the energy and motivation to install the Open Source version...
Kentico Cloud hosts the content inventory/management part, the frontend is hosted on your end. Not aware of any possibilty to host content management part yourself.
I asked Kentico Cloud support, this was their reply.
> Kentico Cloud is a SaaS model, so you need to host the application that consumes data from it. I'm not aware of an option where you would host the content management application.
I'm looking at the awful web site[0] for Directus, and it sure has a lot of screenshots of what appears to be a fairly traditional web-based CMS UI.
I get that what we're seeing may just be a front-end "app" connecting to the core headless CMS via its own API, but at what point has your "headless CMS with a nice UI" just become another traditional CMS?
Headless CMS in this context means it's just the CMS backend (the tail) and not a frontend (the head). The raw content is rendered to a FE view by something else.
Back-end and front-end often mean server-side and client(browserside respectively, eg Front-end developer.
So to be clear, headless CMSs have an admin-facing front-end and back-end to manage content, but only an API for a process to render the content into HTML/CSS/JS for visitors.
That said, headless CMSs can be used for more than just websites.
> When many people today think of cloud-based content management systems (CMS), the names that likely come to mind are WordPress (which we use), or Medium (which people leaving their companies like to use), or Tumblr (which is owned by the same company that owns TC).
So it's a blog hosting service?
> Contentful can provide some of the same functionalities as these but it’s aimed at a different end: CEO and co-founder Sascha Konietzke describes it as a “headless” CMS, not unlike Stripe’s relationship to payments: there is no front end for ingesting and formatting content, or design end for producing the final look of that content for the reader. Instead, there are a set of APIs that developers of the media product in question can use to control both of those aspects more flexibly.
So it's a specialized database?
> “Existing CMSs are like the MS-DOS of the internet,” Konietzke said. “No one really likes to use them, similar to older payment systems before Stripe.”
I guess I thought of all this way later than everyone else. I only just recently wanted to start building a headless CMS and now it seems a ton of really well done ones are coming out. Good to know I can focus on what I actually wanted the CMS for!
Can someone provide a pros/cons of Contentful? I don't get what's so hard about building an API around content. The frontend I get, but the backend seems relatively simple, and the complexities are usually brand-specific
It's not the API. It's that too many applications have Admin UI boilerplate interfaces for managing a lot of their content. And too much time is wasted in building those UIs. I know, I've done it.
The way I see this is, it allows you to completely skip building the content management portion of Admin UIs, and present you with pure content as data, so you have full flexibility over how your website layout looks.
Contentful (and similar services) also _can_ invest lots of time to get a good looking and super usable admin interface that can tackle difficult problems well.
Examples: Sorting of ordered many to many relations, WYSIWYG or markdown editors, workflows, versioning, concurrent editing of items - all the stuff that you don't need for an MVP but if you have hundreds of editors and non dev people working on the actual content.
> “Existing CMSs are like the MS-DOS of the internet,” Konietzke said. “No one really likes to use them, similar to older payment systems before Stripe.”
What a ridiculous statement. Wordpress is so much more popular than Contentful. The vast majority of publications don't need a headless CMS. It's literally half the value proposition of Wordpress (since they have a REST API).
Yeah, I can't see them being worth that much money. Between WP and Drupal's Contenta distribution (http://www.contentacms.org/), you can deploy a free open source system that's way more extendable than a proprietary system ever will.
End-users clearly love to use them (Wordpress esp.), but if the statement was rephrased as "no developer likes to implement or support them" it might be more plausible.
That statement is honestly not without controversy either. Outside of the HN crowd, do you know how easy it is to find Wordpress developers? They all can't possibly hate it.
Headless CMSs are definitely preferred by some front-end /mobile devs who develop apps and publications. But that is a really, really small group compared to web developers and CMS users overall.
I'd suggest that WP developers exist because of the demand for WP developers and not because they enjoy it. How many people would be doing boring CRUD if it didn't earn them money?
Lot's of people are developers because they like building things, solving business problems, understanding users technical needs... I'm amazed that you think the only kind of satisfaction people can derive from their work is by constantly chasing the new and shiny.
There are other communities they could go to. There are plenty of other thriving PHP communities that you could move to, like Laravel or even Drupal. I just don't know how you look at all these successful communities that have lots of talent, conferences, meetups, etc and say "wow they all must hate wordpress"
Maybe now I see what they're saying about being "Stripe." Many headless CMS already exist, that's not what they're innovating on. They're claiming that they have a simple UX like Stripe, compared to other solutions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2616041