The folks at Netlify created Netlify CMS to fill a gap in the static site generation pipeline. There were some great proprietary headless CMS options, but no real contenders that were open source and extensible—that could turn into a community-built ecosystem like WordPress or Drupal. For that reason, Netlify CMS is made to be community-driven, and has never been locked to the Netlify platform (despite the name).

Netlify CMS vs. Netlify

Traditional CMSes are "coupled", which means that the CMS also takes care of the presentation layer responsible for delivering the content to the clients. The content and the presentation are closely interlinked. Typically, content managers create and manage their content through tools like WYSIWYG editors. The CMS then delivers the content according to the front-end delivery layer built into the CMS. Typically, a traditional CMS supports your websites but not much else.

A pure headless CMS is different, because it offers no front-end capabilities at all, giving you full control of your customer experience via APIs. The CMS typically provides content managers with a presentation and channel agnostic way of managing content. It requires a front-end development team to manage the rest with the frameworks and tools they prefer: The content can be loaded by external applications which handle the content delivery to the client, meaning that the content can be (re-)used by multiple applications and channels (web, mobile app, audio guides, IOT).

the expanding selection of CMS options for site generators remove the need to maintain a separate stack for content and marketing.

There is some confusion around what makes a headless CMS truly “headless”, as vendors use the term somewhat loosely to label their decoupled or hybrid CMS systems. But a true headless CMS is one that was built from the ground up to be API-first, not a full monolith CMS with APIs attached afterwards.

The popular question in my company these days is “Rails or WordPress?”, but I will probably touch upon the broader questions of “MVC or CMS?” and “Ruby or PHP?”, so you can often substitute “Rails” for “MVC framework” in the article.

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And while content analytics tools (e.g., Chartbeat, Parsely, Content Insights) and feedback platforms (e.g., Hearken, GroundSource) have thankfully helped close the gap, the core content management experience remains, for most of us, little improved when it comes to including the audience in the process.

an environment unlike anything they will encounter outside of school

ability to deploy in a variety of learning environments due to the diversity of implementation approaches that schools utilize .

We use @Caolan's excellent Async library. Our code is not 5 level deep nested callbacks. We currently have about 45,000 lines of Javascript in our main repository. In this code base, we have used the async library as our only flow control library. Our current use of the library in our code base: async.waterfall: 74 async.forEach: 55 async.forEachSeries: 21 async.series: 8 async.parallel: 4 async.queue: 3 I highly suggest, that if you are unsure about Node.js and are going to do an experiment project, make sure you use Async, Step, or one of the other flow control modules for your experiment. It will help you better understand how most larger Node.js applications are built.

We decided to make a spreadsheet of the possible environments we would consider using for our next generation product. The inputs were: Community Velocity Correctness (aka, static typing-like things) Debuggability/Tooling Downtime/Compile Time Libraries (Standard/External) Testability Team Experience Performance Production We setup the spreadsheet so we could change the weight of each category. This let us play with our feelings, what if we only cared about developer velocity? What if we only cared about testability?