The Headless CMS, powered by Git.
CloudCannon is more than a headless CMS. Our Git-based headless CMS helps your team stay in sync with a unified workflow.
Why go headless? (What is headless, anyway?)
A headless CMS decouples a website’s content repository from its presentation layer, giving developers and content writers more freedom to work independently, and meaning the CMS doesn't dictate how content is displayed or delivered. In comparison, monolithic content management systems tend to be more inflexible, with only one channel for content publication, a limiting tech stack, and reduced scalability at high traffic loads.
CloudCannon’s Git-based approach to the headless CMS gives both developers and content writers as much portability and freedom as possible, with all the benefits of the headless approach. In an API-driven headless CMS, however, content and code are usually vendor-locked, held in proprietary databases, and difficult to backup and export — making it difficult for users to ever really be in control of their website.
With CloudCannon and your chosen Git provider, developers working on the presentation layer — the code — have greater flexibility, scalability, and agility in building digital experiences. Meanwhile, content writers and marketing teams can access and edit their content, build new pages without developers, and more easily publish changes to production or staging websites.
Decouple your content and code
Because your content and code are decoupled, content writers commit back to your Git repository through CloudCannon's Content, Source, or Visual Editors.
It's also important to separate your staging and production branches — and with CloudCannon anyone can create branches for significant changes to prevent blocking staging environments. Once everyone's happy with your changes, you can merge your branched sites together.
And because CloudCannon is based on Git workflows, you can always roll back your site changes, with full version control of both code and content. Here's how it all works:
Implementing your headless CMS
Setting up some headless content management systems can be a challenge. CloudCannon’s initial setup is as easy as signing in with your Git provider, then connecting and configuring your existing static site. (And with our configuration GUI, that final step is even simpler.)
Integrating CloudCannon with specific frontend frameworks (static site generators) is also straightforward. CloudCannon supports all major static site generators, and automatically recognizes which SSG you’re using to build your site.
Even though your content and code are decoupled, non-technical editors don’t have to guess what the finished website will look like. Because CloudCannon renders content directly from Git repositories (and isn’t constantly calling an API for data), CloudCannon’s Visual Editor provides instant and editable content previews, allowing content teams to see how changes will appear on the site before they are published. Once the Visual Editor is set up, content teams can edit directly on the page, build new pages, and take control of their websites, all without needing a developer.
Git and multichannel delivery — the best of both worlds
Through features like Site Mounting and support for static API generators like Flatlake, CloudCannon brings true multichannel content delivery to Git-based content. Teams can leverage the benefits of flat files and Git while delivering content to websites, web apps, digital signage, and any other channel.
Site Mounting
Easily reuse your centrally managed site components and shared layouts across multiple CloudCannon sites and keep these components on all of your sites up to date — all from one single source of truth.
Static API generation with Flatlake
Flatlake is an open-source tool built by CloudCannon that exposes a headless API over a set of static git-based files. It enables data aggregation and sharing between multiple websites, and allows Git-based content to be more easily integrated into mobile applications and other content channels.
Optimize your headless CMS
Once you’ve set up your new headless CMS, you can further optimize your static site generator, your custom components, and any chained tooling for the best SEO and performance results.
SEO is a crucial factor for online businesses, and is usually part of a larger content strategy. When it comes to creating content that search engines can easily index, custom components can help content teams remember to use meta and open graph tags effectively — either by requiring fields to be completed or by reminding your team. CloudCannon developers can also improve their site’s online visibility by leveraging the sitemaps automatically created at each commit.
Connecting open-source software to your post-build process can add functionality like site search, optimization for user experience and core web vitals scores, and more.
Finally, no matter which SSG you choose, you’ll immediately see the benefits of static generation for serving websites at scale. With CloudCannon, your sites are served from a global CDN, so users all around the world will have the best possible experience.
TL;DR
Here are the important points:
- Decouple where you can. Separate your content and code from your presentation layer.
- Branching is your friend. With Git behind your CMS, your content is always yours.
- Multichannel delivery is easier than you think. No matter which frontend framework you use.
- Static sites are here to stay. And with CloudCannon, they're editable by everyone.
Ready to get started?
Try out CloudCannon with a 14-day free trial, or get in touch with us for a demo.