Contentful, a Stripe for content management, raises $28M led by General Catalyst
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Directus is an open source alternative that has the same features for free. So we wet with this. Very happy with this CMS.
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...
Still interesting.
Do you have a link for that? I couldn't find anything about self hosting.
(But I did check it out, and it definitely is quite capable!)
> 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.
So no self hosted option.
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?
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.”
…wat wow
Another one that came out recently was sanity.io.
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.
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.
If it's anywhere near as brilliant in implementation as Stripe is I really want to know, since it will probably make my life easier.
I often find "Uber for X" or "Stripe for Y" confusing. If Stripe were doing Y they wouldn't be Stripe now, would they?
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).
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.
Boring is good.
Boring means I don't get phone calls at 11PM on a Saturday night.
Boring means work isn't my life.
http://docs.alfresco.com/5.0/concepts/API-intro.html
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.