1 minute read
Headless Craft CMS and what makes it special
Insights
Written by
Paul
Paul is our Lead Developer who brings extensive experience and knowledge to the team. Highly focused and motivated by a good challenge, Paul is a key driver in advancing processes and procedures, ensuring the successful development of every project.
Craft CMS is arguably one of the best CMS platforms currently available (You can read about why we like Craft CMS here) and if you combine the power of Craft with a headless approach to website development, then you end up with an incredibly fast, scalable and very flexible solution.
Removing the head from Craft CMS
Whilst Craft CMS is packed full of very nice features, the current version (unfortunately) does not a provide an API. So we built one.
Our Craft CMS API plugin allows us to retrieve any content created within Craft ready to be used however we need, should that be in a traditional mobile app or on the frontend of a website.
Single page applications
Single page applications in web development are a fast growing trend, and rightly so. With a SPA the website effectively only loads once and then as you navigate around the site the content is pulled in from an API and updated dynamically - so no more page refreshes. SPAs give us great flexibility and are capable of providing the fastest website speeds.
There are many ways to build a single page application and there are many challenges to consider when building one. But we've done all that hard work already and have our own SPA ready to go; we like to call this Atom.
Built with Vue.js, Atom works best with Craft CMS and our API plugin to pull in data at very fast speeds. Atom also comes bundled with some extra nice features that further increases page speeds.
Advantages of going headless
These are just a few of the reasons why you should consider a headless Craft CMS website:
- Unrivalled speed
- App-like website - When navigating the website on a mobile device, it feels as though you are interacting with a native mobile app.
- Faster development - Regardless of chosen CMS, developers can work in their own environment with their own tool set.
- Fewer limitations - Not restricted by any CMS design limitations.
- Easier maintenance - Easy to maintain websites and deploy changes with zero downtime.
Open source development
Nzime supports open source projects and that's why we made the decision to open source our Craft CMS API plugin.
