Have Perch Runway perform double-duty as a headless CMS
Your online content strategy should no longer be restricted to your primary website. When it comes to publishing – and reusing – your content in marketing sub-sites, mobile apps, third-party systems and such you don’t need to choose between a traditional web CMS and a headless alternative.
Perch Runway helps you make the most of your investment in a CMS solution by offering both. Whilst serving HTML-based content pages as part of your website, it can also be configured to seamlessly run as a headless content API serving your mobile apps, single-page JavaScript apps and any service you wish to share content with.
Sometimes called a decoupled CMS, a headless system seeks to make an architectural separation between the content and the presentation. Many traditional CMSs create a tight coupling of the content and the theme used. A headless CMS deals just with the content and not the presentation.
A great example of tight coupling of content and presentation is the WYSIWYG editor. Those editors bake HTML right into the content – if you want to use that content without HTML, you’ve then got a difficult job trying to clean it all up. This is something Perch Runway has always avoided.
Ask a headless CMS for content and it’ll give you raw data, not a web page. This raw data is then used by another layer in the system (such as a JavaScript app running in a browser, or a native app running on a phone) to generate the presentation layer that the end users sees.
A content management system should take the pain out of managing content, wherever it’s published. The Runway headless mode enables a developer to set up dedicated views on your content to be consumed by other systems.
Developers can create views that contain different sources of content that need to be fetched in a single request.
Views protect and enforce your business logic on the server, enabling fast, unauthenticated requests for the content you’ve chosen to expose.
Support multiple external systems with custom data feeds. If a service can consume JSON data then you’re all set to go.
Download Perch Runway 3 and then head straight for the Headless Requests documentation to learn how to start using Runway as a headless CMS today.
