The idea of a “headless CMS” is gaining momentum lately.  If you’ve not heard of it, the concept is that of a decoupled CMS in the sense that content storage and management is handled entirely separately from the presentation.

The idea, which is truly a re-hash of a debate that also occurred a decade ago – is that today’s optimal content management system isn’t one that also handles the display of the look and feel of the content it manages. It simply manages the raw, structured content in a unified repository. It then makes the content available as a “service” through an API and it is up to the developer to create and develop the presentation layer; be it in a web site, web app, mobile app etc…  And, now, there are some that are passionately arguing for this model to be the new standard.

This is wrong.

Now, it may be that some of the people weren’t around when we debated the agility, flexibility and ultimate scalability of this model ten years ago. But, the argument remain the same.