Headless CMS

Hi Yusuke,

A headless CMS is basically a CMS that stores and manages content and exposes it via an API (usually JSON over HTTP). It does not handle page rendering or theming; the front end is a separate app that just consumes the API.

CMS Builder sits pretty close to that:

• It handles content modeling, storage, and retrieval.
• It does not force any templating system or theme on you.
• It gives you PHP code snippets that return records/lists as arrays, and you decide what to output.

Out of the box, those snippets are usually used to output HTML, but there is nothing stopping you from doing:

header('Content-Type: application/json');
echo json_encode($records);
exit;

At that point, that PHP page is an API endpoint, and CMS Builder is effectively acting as a headless CMS behind it.

So while CMS Builder is not a headless CMS by default in the sense that it does not ship with a generic JSON API, it is designed as a toolkit to let you build your own CMS. If you use it to expose your content through JSON endpoints, what you have built on top of it is a headless CMS.

So if you are responding to a quote request that requires a headless CMS, you can quite honestly say: yes, we can provide a headless CMS architecture and deliver all content through JSON APIs.

Hope that helps!

Also, I’ll add that if you use a headless setup, you build the front end a bit differently.

Instead of using PHP's getRecords() to load a $records var and loop over it, you'd code your front end to fetch JSON from your API and render it. That could be plain JavaScript using fetch/AJAX to populate the page, or a frontend framework like React, Vue, or Angular, or even a server-side app (PHP, Node, etc.) that calls the JSON API and renders HTML.