Making Content Management A Smooth Experience With A Headless CMS

Summary

Building a web application requires integrating a number of separate concerns into a single experience. One of the common requirements is a content management system to allow product owners and marketers to make the changes needed for them to do their jobs. Rather than spend the time and focus of your developers to build the end to end system a growing trend is to use a headless CMS. In this episode Jake Lumetta shares why he decided to spend his time and energy on building a headless CMS as a service, when and why you might want to use one, and how to integrate it into your applications so that you can focus on the rest of your application.

Announcements

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• Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Jake Lumetta about Butter CMS and the role of a headless CMS in the modern web ecosystem.

Interview

• Introductions
• How did you get introduced to Python?
• Can you start by describing what a headless CMS is?
  • How does the use case and user experience differ from working with a traditional CMS (e.g. WordPress, etc.)?
  • How does a headless CMS compare to using a framework such as Django CMS or Wagtail?
• Can you describe what you have built at ButterCMS?
  • What was your motivation for starting a business to provide a CMS as a service?
• How would you characterize the current state of the CMS ecosystem?
  • How does ButterCMS compare to the available open source and commercial options?
• What are the trends in the web ecosystem that have made a headless CMS necessary or useful?
• What types of information are people managing in a CMS?
• How are people integrating headless CMS systems into their Python applications?
• Can you describe the architecture for Butter?
  • How has the system changed or evolved since you first began working on it?
  • What was your decision process for determining what language(s) and technology stack to use for building the platform?
• What are the aspects of building and maintaining a CMS that are most complex?
• What are some of the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen ButterCMS used?
• What have you found to be the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while building ButterCMS?
• When is ButterCMS the wrong choice?
• What do you have planned for the future of ButterCMS?

Keep In Touch

• LinkedIn
• @jakelumetta on Twitter

Picks

• Tobias
  • The Arrow TV Show
• Jake
  • Ghost In The Wires by Kevin Mitnick

Closing Announcements

• Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, the Data Engineering Podcast for the latest on modern data management.
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Links

• ButterCMS
  • Hiring: Dir of Engineering
• PHP
• Django
• MVC == Model, View, Controller
• Headless CMS
• WordPress
• Django CMS
• Wagtail
  • Podcast Episode
• SEO == Search Engine Optimization
• JAM (Javascript, APIs, and Markup) Stack
• Netlify
• Vercel
• Cloudflare Pages
• Vue.js
• React.js
• Django Rest Framework
• Fastly
• CDN == Content Delivery Network
• AWS Cloudfront
• Ionic
• React Native

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA