CMS
The foomo team has extensive experience with a wide range of CMS systems. Our long journey in the field has brought us very close to the https://jamstack.org . We almost exclusively work with https://app.contentful.com/ but we are watching others like https://strapi.io/ and https://directus.io/ very closely.
Expectations and challenges
- application developers want an environment, that ensures maximum productivity, they do not think of semantic structures, they think of routes
- customers expect maximum control and flexibility when working with content and do not distinguish between content and applications
The need for dynamic rendering
If you can - render static content and distribute it with a CDN.
There are use cases though, where static site generation does not work like
- highly personalized content
- mixing content with entities from other systems, that have a different life cycle, like products
Application routes vs semantic URL structures
Bridging the conceptual gap between sematic content and applications.
Content especially when created with a focus on SEO comes as a semantic graph. This typically conflicts with how application developers see the world.
e-commerce as an example
Let us take a look at a real world example:
| application route / ingress | app developers view | SEO URL requirement |
|---|---|---|
| /content/:id | /content/1 | / |
| /content/2 | /mens | |
| /category/:id | /category/1 | /mens/shirts |
| /category/2 | /mens/shirts/business | |
| /product/:id | /product/1 | /mens-shirt-awesome-blue-medium |
| /store/:id | /store/1 | /mens/stores/london-perfect-shirts |
| /store/2 | /kids/stores/lego-paradise |
our approach
contentserver allows you to resolve URIs to mime types, which can be handled by applications.
Let us return to our ecommerce example.
model content
| mime type | cms entity | application eg k8s service |
|---|---|---|
| application/x-page | page | https://frontend_service_page |
| application/x-category | category | https://frontend_service_category |
| application/x-store | store | https://frontend_service_store |
export contentent to contentserver
contentserver allows you to export your content tree as json
resolving URIs
Use standard application routing whereever possible, since it is the most efficient option.
Once all standard URI resolution fails, query contentserver and it will return the resolved node
Now you have the mime-type and you know which application can handle it.