By the Power of Headless!

Hi everybody, I hope you are enjoying the conference so far. My name is Samuel Snowcombe and I'm here to talk about Headless, a fabulous secret powers who were revealed to me the day I discovered the JAMstack and the Headless. And this is basically the subtitle of this talk where I will be talking about the Headless CMSs and if you have any questions in the future you can follow me on Twitter and you can ask any time.

So what are the Headless CMSs and what is the difference against the Monolithic CMSs? To short put it into 3 points, I would say there is a decouple, they are decoupled so they are not telling you which front end framework you should use and what backend API you should consume. They give you freedom of choice and freedom of your decisions and what you like. So also the way that you are not limited to the integrations that they are offering but you can integrate your app, website, anything you want to have from the third party solutions. Also as they are focusing on the content management system and the management they can focus on the user experience. So they are building an application using which you are building and collaborating on your content. And this application is on a daily basis basically updated and they make a new iteration which makes it better and better without any time requirements from your side as developers. And additionally to that they give you a very good developer experience as you can use any content management API or any API you want to have and then you will work with the tools you like and want to work with. And also the valid point which should be the traditional CMS's are already moving in this direction also. So they are showing that the Headless is really a thing and I think it will be a very important part of the web ecosystem in the following at least 10 years.

So that brings me to the evolution. So in my opinion the Headless CMS is our next step in the evolution which is also kind of bringing us a little bit back but it's bringing finally the right. We make the web right finally. So with the gem stack and all that stuff the Headless CMS is where the missing part that we wanted to help for the framework like NakedJS or LinuxJS. So at the beginning we had just a file. We put them on the server directly by the FTP protocol and then we created some kind of versioning system so we put the content directly to the website or somehow version it and then we also have this powerful monolithic CMS that were put on the own servers. Then they have finally the features like the content authority, internet simulation, even the preview modes and different stuff. But we at the end wanted only those features. We did not want those CMSs telling me how I should build my website. This is what the headless CMSs are doing. They give you all the freedom of those features. They are needed for the content editors but still they give you also the freedom to a developer to choose and build a website with what they need. So they are not, and the storyblock is not as a headless CMS and not a database solution. It's not only for developers. It's very in mind the user and the content editors, marketers. All those are the end-users of the storyblock at a point. So it's not choosing your technology stack. It's not locking you.

If somebody is locking you in, it's not the headless CMS. And it not requires from you any updates. So you will have an update of your application and of the tool you are using for management of the content almost every week or day.

So the storyblocks as the headless CMS give you the freedom to structure your project as you need. If you need a flat structure or you need a folder structure, you need different slides you want to build it from the atomic design principle as a contextual principle or structure, it's up to you. You will choose your technology or API. You can extend even the UI. So it's not restricting only the features they are offering, we are offering.

And finally, you have a time to invest all the resources from the customers to the solution. Instead of building the ecosystem around the solution, you can really focus on the user experience of your website or application. So storyblock, instead of that, take care, even for more stuff like security, updating the UI to the latest trends, updating the performance of the database, which all you get basically for free without even noticing that because you don't need to change anything. There's like no structural changes, and you just get faster system suddenly because the update was already delivered.

So if you are choosing new CMS, you should definitely choose some features. And you should think about the future and what features you will need in your system. So for example, how you will translate it. So what kind of strategies you're for. Inter-installation, what kind of workflow can you set up? Do you have an event right? You can restrict some areas. Can you schedule a content to the future or a bundle of content together? Can you create pipelines where there is a frozen content so you can do some editing and there is a pipeline or stage where the content is frozen and you are 100% sure that everything is correct. What is the editing experience? Is there a way to preview your draft content? Or do you have some context to your real-time editing experience? How you can integrate, extend the stuff? And this list goes on and goes on and goes on.

So if you want to find out more about how to build something with the Headless CMS and React and Next.js together, go and visit my workshop next Monday where we will be building a website using the Storyblock. And you can find out how you can create something like a real-time editing experience where you can click and change the stuff. You can copy paste. And how this works dynamically without hitting the save button. And how you can translate and build the website together. So how you can build your first website with Headless, with Next.js, and that will be covered in my workshop which you can visit for free in React Summit Remote the next Monday after this talk. See you there, and I hope you enjoyed the lightning talk and I hope you will check out the Headless CMSes and also the Storyblock. That's it.