Going Headless – Without Losing The Business Head

There’s a lot of focus on creating headless experiences. After all, it just makes sense. Headless means you have full separation of content and presentation and can use any modern development tool or framework to create the presentation (the head).

This comes with all kinds of benefits:

• You can be flexible in your project design. For example - are you creating an app? Headless means you can use a modern JavaScript framework (like React) to build a progressive web application (PWA) with no restrains from existing technologies in place
• Your business is faster-to-market. Removing framework constraints certainly helps cut down on development time.
• More frequent development releases. Less time spent trying to be compliant with monolithic paradigms, or being reliant on specialized developers, means your dev team can be leaner and meaner.  

With the rise of frontend developers who use modern JavaScript frameworks like React, Vue, and/or Angular, there’s also a lot of focus now around selecting what kind of Headless CMS (like Jahia!) to use as the content funnel to this so-called "head."

Many first movers, led by IT initiatives, have taken a pure headless CMS approach - noting the technological benefits that it brings to their development cycles. For business users, however, this one step forward and two steps back. With pure Headless CMS's, the system is focused almost entirely around the developer, catering to their specific needs and foci. That leaves business users and marketers, who need a similarly-robust interface that allows them to create content and ensure that it is both viable and optimized, with the technological equivalent of a kiddie pool.

Needless to say, business users (rightly) needed a better option.

With jContent, Jahia delivers a more unique, hybrid approach, focused on delivering a platform that meets developer and IT needs while still ensuring business users and marketers have every tool at their disposal in order to ensure success.

It manages this in a few ways. For business users, they can:

• Create and manage content for any channel or interaction - app, kiosk, or AI-enhanced toilet plunger (we'll assume Apple is working on one of those right now) - from a single UI
• In-context content editing, ensuring they can see what they're publishing before hitting the "go" button
• True headless personalization, with built-in A/B testing and optimization functionality through additional CDP integrations, all of which can be tracked

It must be stressed - Developers maintain the same flexibility as any pure Headless CMS. They can still create the presentation they want, on the framework they want, and deliver it out how they want. Jahia's powerful API, built on GraphQL, further enables their success. 

Going Headless has a lot of value, but that doesn’t mean you should compromise the needs of the rest of your business for a new, shiny toy. With jContent from Jahia, you won't have to.