We all know the future of Content Management Systems is headless: content is created in a certain specialized system which is not necessarily responsible to deliver it to end users.

Up until now these two facets were bundled. You’ve created a post in the WordPress dashboard and displayed to your users again using a WordPress theme.

In the future you’ll be able to create content in any system, anywhere, and still be able to display in your website as it was created on your own website’s backend. This is called headless and semantic, distributed web. The bright new future we all need.

Why this change?

The nature of the web is napstering: decomposing monolithic and monopolistic structures by eliminating the middlemen. The newly born layers will form a new market with new leaders, which later will be napstered again. The law of entropy, one might say.

WordPress became a monolith and a monopoly in the sense that it controlled both the server, the data, the content and the presentation layer. And it was napstered by many new markets like microservices instead of servers; federated data instead of one single centralised database; better visual content designers and editors like Wix, Contentful, and co; React and other component frameworks instead of themes on front-end.

It was a revelation to read Strategies For Headless Projects With Structured Content Management Systems on Smashing Magazine by Knut Melvær who is behind one of the most interesting new players in this scene, Sanity.io