When starting a new project, decision makers are faced with the dilemma of choosing a content management system (CMS). Sometimes, it’s not that simple and they must choose whether to go with a traditional CMS or a headless CMS. Both offer unique benefits and cater to different needs, making it crucial to understand when each makes sense for your project. Let’s take a look at some considerations that can help you make the right decision.

What is a Traditional CMS?

Traditional CMS’s – like Craft CMS, WordPress, and Drupal – offer a pre-packaged solution for content creation, management, and delivery. They include powerful interfaces with content editing capabilities and templating out of the box, enabling you to create sites with ease. A traditional CMS can be monolithic because the back-end and front-end are tightly coupled. Using a traditional CMS typically means you are using all of the tools included to achieve your goal.

What is a Headless CMS?

A Headless CMS is like a Traditional CMS in that it includes content creation and management tools. But it differs in the fact that the back-end content management system is decoupled from the front-end (presentation layer), allowing developers to use any technology stack they prefer for building the front-end of the site. The back-end acts as an API with its only purpose being to serve content from the database. There are CMS options like Contentful, Payload, and Strapi that are built to be headless. Popular traditional CMS’s like Craft CMS and WordPress also offer headless variants.

The Restaurant Analogy

Let’s simplify things a bit more and look at the decision using an analogy; a restaurant.

Traditional Restaurant (Traditional CMS)

Imagine a restaurant where the kitchen and dining room are connected. The chefs cook the food, and the waitstaff serve it directly to the customers in the same building. This setup means that everything is closely integrated, and the kitchen (back-end) is tightly coupled to the dining experience (front-end). Picture a scenario where the restaurant decides to change from table service to buffet style. The food now needs to be prepared in advance and delivered to the front of house in a different way, potentially even requiring new equipment. The restaurant needs to be reconfigured to not only accommodate the buffet but also to interface with the kitchen differently. Because the restaurant and kitchen are coupled, both sides would require work in order to accommodate a shift in strategy. 

Ghost Kitchen (Headless CMS)

Now, think of a ghost (or cloud) kitchen where food is prepared centrally but can be delivered to various locations or dining experiences. The kitchen (back-end) focuses solely on cooking (content creation and management) and doesn't worry about where the food is served. Instead, the meals (content) can be delivered to different endpoints like food trucks, home deliveries, or partner restaurants (or in our case websites, mobile apps, etc.). This separation allows more flexibility in how and where the content is delivered without changing the core cooking process. If a new experience requires new equipment or processes, the kitchen can be expanded without affecting the front-end experience.

When to Use a Headless CMS

Omni-Channel Content Delivery 

If you consistently need to deliver content across multiple platforms (websites, mobile apps, IoT devices), a headless CMS is ideal because it can serve the same content through APIs to any front-end. The front-end can be swapped out without any need for development to the back-end.

Scalability and Flexibility

If you want the ability to keep your content management system up-to-date independently of the presentation layer, a headless CMS can allow for more agile and scalable development. This could be especially useful if you anticipate needing to redesign or update parts of the front-end frequently without affecting the back-end content.

Front-end Framework Preferences

Maybe your team has developers who are very proficient in a particular JavaScript framework, like Next.js, SvelteKit, or Astro. The time needed to learn a new templating language could push you past your deadline. Maybe you have some cool interactive interface in mind? A headless CMS can provide the raw content for your developers to build highly custom, tailor-made front-ends in whatever language or framework they please.

Security

Going headless can offer security advantages due to its decoupled nature. By communicating via API to the front-end, data access can be controlled more granularly. Because the back-end is only responsible for content management and delivery, fewer plugins are typically used which means a smaller chance of vulnerabilities due to third-party software.

Hosting & Infrastructure

A cloud-based headless CMS offers additional advantages over a self-hosted headless CMS. It can simplify maintenance and operating costs since the cloud provider is responsible for updates and security of the platform. Cloud-based solutions like Strapi Cloud often come with integrated security features, automatic backups, and disaster recovery options.

Which will you choose?

While the flexibility and security a headless CMS offers may be great benefits, it may not be necessary for every project and could even introduce complexity. It’s important to consider the long-term purpose of the project and who will be responsible for maintaining it as well as authoring content. If your primary focus is on managing and delivering content in a structured manner with rapid development, a traditional CMS can be an excellent choice. But if you feel any of the examples I’ve laid out above align with your project’s requirements then a headless CMS may be right for you! 

Whatever route you take, remember that both Craft CMS and WordPress can be used in traditional or headless applications and are a fine choice either way! Now you know the differences between a traditional and headless CMS, and an informed decision can be made. If you have more questions or a project you think could benefit from a traditional or headless CMS, we’d love to help!

Five years ago, without consciously trying, I would have noticed if a coworker was taking a break, feeling extra chatty, or looking hyper-focused. I got to choose whether to respond and how I might build rapport by responding (I’m sure I didn’t always get it right). Now that more of the Viget team works from home than in an office, I feel a loss. I have less awareness of other people's states of mind and fewer chances to demonstrate my interest. I need to learn new ways of connecting. 

I took notice when Adam Grant recently posted about pebbling: 

Sending memes, links, and videos to others isn't trivial. It signals that you're thinking of them and want them to share your joy. It's known as pebbling, based on penguins gifting pebbles to potential partners. Pebbling is an act of care. Every pebble is a bid for connection.” 

Grant acknowledges that the term "pebbling" comes from penguins, but he also uses the phrase “bid for connection,” which I associate with John Gottman. Gottman is a well-known psychologist who has researched marital stability and relationships. His work provides insights into how small interactions, or "bids," play a crucial role in building strong relationships. 

Gottman defines a "bid" as any attempt from one person to another for attention, affirmation, affection, or any positive connection. A bid can be as explicit as saying, “I had such a hard day,” or as random as saying, “Did you see the size of that red bird?” The impact of responding with interest (turning toward) or ignoring or dismissing (turning away from) significantly influences the quality of the relationship. A simple, “Tell me what happened,” or “What? No, I missed it!” can foster closeness and trust. Silence or something like, “Here we go again,” will spark feelings of neglect and distance.

Gottman's research is widely cited and has impacted my understanding of relationships.  I'm interested in bids for connection at work, particularly as our work environment has changed dramatically in recent years.

Connections at Work

Finding the right balance of work and non-work is a central challenge for most of us as we navigate demands on our time and energy. I generally hope work is a small enough part of a person’s life that they have time for many other things, but also that their work environment is engaging and meaningful enough that they enjoy it. I hope friendships emerge at work, mostly through collaboration or out of the gaps between responsibilities. 

As remote work has become commonplace, I find it’s harder to foster connections than it was before. The lack of proximity, and therefore organic social interactions, makes it harder for me to know my coworkers and be known by them. I’m not advocating for returning to offices. I’m noticing that after working with people for years in an office, I knew them better – their nerves before a presentation, their ability to set new people at ease, their grandma’s soup recipe, their knack for deadpan humor – and that made my life better. While many of my coworkers collaborate with each other daily through pair programming, design critiques, or iteration planning meetings, my work on a small People Team has always been less collaborative. For me, fewer organic in-person interactions means fewer interactions of any kind at work. 

The decline in ad-hoc opportunities for connecting impacts us all differently, but I am particularly interested because an aspect of my role at Viget is to nurture a strong company culture. For us that means a culture where we do excellent work, learn a lot, support each other, and – yes – make some friends. I’m looking for ways we can adapt our employee engagement efforts to the new work environment and evolve how we cultivate alignment.

The concept of "bids for connection" seems useful for understanding the building blocks of connection and, over time, friendships. As a mostly remote company, I want to be sure we’re asking: How do people make bids? How do others respond to them? What parts of the work environment encourage us to turn towards a bid? 

Bids While Distributed

There needs to be “space” for these interactions to happen across a distributed company, and we need to notice what is working and why. One opportunity for bids to play out is in recurring meetings. At Viget, we try to be efficient with our time, but we also build in time for informal interactions.  

Daily Stand-up Meetings

The discipline and project teams that do daily stand-ups are careful to keep them brief. These meetings need to be reliably quick-paced in order to fulfill their purpose. Still, without sacrificing efficiency, these meetings can spark strong bids for connection. Sharing work updates in small, daily increments encourages people to open up about specific elements of their progress. The specificity allows for connection in ways that broad strokes do not. Hearing someone say, “Progress was slow, but I’m finally done with the feature,” I might respond, “Oh, good.” But hearing someone say, “If I don’t figure out how to debug this API integration by noon, we need to update the launch timeline," gives me a chance to be curious, helpful, and invested in something very specific. 

Weekly All-Hands Meeting

Every Friday, our whole company meets for about an hour. The first 15 minutes are deliberately set aside for informal conversations and sharing, which mostly happens over Slack. We often play music or show a live stream of something noteworthy, like an eagle’s nest, to which we can react. Someone might share where they were when they first heard this song. Someone else might reveal they are an experienced falconer. The whole company gets a chance to see or hear these things, and while only a handful may react, we are all building shared awareness and memories.

Monthly Team Meeting

During a team meeting, a small group of same-discipline-peers comes together to talk shop, share lessons learned, or bond. These meetings allow for exercises that don’t scale to a whole company – like getting feedback or planning progress – and over time, certain activities can become team favorites. A monthly “rose, bud, thorn” or an annual “sharing circle” ritual prompts people to share in ways that otherwise might feel too awkward or vulnerable.

Another way to make and respond to bids for connection across locations is on Slack. Different kinds of Slack channels offer different kinds of opportunities.

Interest-based Slack Channels

At Viget we have channels like #woodworking, #sewing, #starwars, #hot-sauce, #gardening, #home-improvement, and many, many more. These types of channels allow people to go deeper than they might in more general channels. You know you’re talking to like-minded people, so why not dive fully into your opinion on robot vacuum cleaners?

"Random" Slack Channel

In our #random channel, I’ve seen everything from a heads up on free Firehouse subs to a recommendation for an estate planning system. The responses vary, too – sometimes they spark day-long conversations. At a minimum, posts will get a smattering of emoji responses and the impact can be significant. For example, a post might get a sympathetic :heart: but then a couple :same: or :it-me: come in and before you know it, there’s a subset of coworkers who realize they share the same rare phobia. I also think a share in #random can signal, “I’m between tasks. I’m open to distractions right now,” and folks can follow up with a DM.

Project-Specific Slack Channel

In channels where everyone is working on the same project with shared goals, stresses, and deadlines, we might see bids that build momentum. A PM might post something in the morning to encourage the team to rally behind a tough deadline. A designer might post mid-week, acknowledging the drudgery of certain tasks, implicitly giving everyone else permission to do the same. A developer might be slowly building a little arsenal of inside jokes and call-backs over weeks, dropping a note at just the right time to get others laughing. Someone might turn one of those jokes into a custom emoji that lives well beyond the project timeline and every time that inside-joke-emoji gets used, it's a bid for folks who worked on that team to recognize each other and reconnect. 

Recognizing Bids

We all grew up learning in-person social norms and have a mostly shared understanding of what’s considered warm, polite, stand-off-ish, or rude in the workplace. Now that we’re distributed, we may need to learn to recognize new signals and define new norms. 

A bid is an action that invites connection, but sometimes the action is so small, we might not notice it or realize it has potential value. Understanding the concept of bids can help us notice them and respond with more awareness. 

If we train ourselves to see bids for what they are and respond accordingly, we may get more mileage out of the limited impromptu interactions we have as remote coworkers. Actions like responding to an open-ended question in a Slack channel or acknowledging someone’s request for help during a meeting go a long way. Each response builds trust and camaraderie, even if in tiny doses. When a comment or question is ignored or dismissed, the negative effect is compounding; that person is less likely to reach out again.

Adam Grant said sharing memes and links are a way to invite someone to share in your joy.  At a distributed company, “bids” take a lot of different shapes, but they all communicate things like, “I am here,” and “let’s work together,” and “you can trust me.”

I’m encouraged to think we already have some infrastructure in place at Viget to support remote bids for connection. I’m excited to work with Aubrey Lear and others to find ways to evolve that infrastructure. We’ll continue to hire people who want to develop friendships with coworkers and who are willing to take personal responsibility for making and turning towards bids. Together, we can make sure Viget remains a great place to work as the workplace continues to evolve.