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Welcome to the 14th edition of Word on the Future. Thank you for being here with us.
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Keywords: headless WordPress; content mesh; technical debt; Gatsby
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Innovate your way out of technical debt:
headless WordPress and the content mesh
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At The Digital Transformation Conference in London the other week, a good part of the conversations around sustainable digital transformation were highlighting a somewhat typical challenge: ambitious teams being held back in their digital innovation and experimentation by inherited technical debt.
Developers spend a third of their time on technical debt. And a good amount of what is considered technical debt in the world of online publishing and digital experience today can be traced back to the concept of the ‘monolithic CMS’: a single application to store and manage content, generate web pages and deliver them to an audience – like market-leading open source CMSs such WordPress and Drupal.
Editorial teams usually benefit greatly from publishing experiences like the WordPress Block Editor and its ability to generate WYSIWYG page previews. Developers today, however, may prefer to decouple the presentation layer from WordPress’ business logic in order to be able to build lean and iterate fast.
Enter the content mesh. There has been a good deal of buzz around the term lately, mostly in the context of React-powered static site generators like Gatsby. Here’s the gist of it: instead of relying on one monolithic, singular application for content creation, management, and delivery, the content mesh intertwines a plurality of services and sources – each of which specializes in a single capability: search, authentication, static content, media management etc.
Sounds familiar? Definitely, if you’ve followed the emergence of the digital experience platform (DXP).
Both, the DXP and the content mesh, can enable rapid innovation and add to a business’ bottom line by reducing technical debt; both promise interoperability and flexibility, and both rely on the headless CMS (headless WordPress, in our case) as a content hub.
The DXP takes a more integrated approach in so far that it delivers a centralized, curated, secure platform to build flexible solutions upon, whereas the content mesh emphasizes the interoperable approach whilst leaving questions of infrastructure and maintenance mostly unanswered.
On their digital transformation journey, enterprises will often need to be pragmatic and aim to get the best out of both worlds: explore the opportunities of a decoupled, interoperable content mesh while taking advantage of the built-in editorial features a full-stack DXP can deliver reliably.
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Tim Kadlec
Autor & Web Performance Consultant
on Edge Computing
“Whenever we take a part of the technology stack and make it more approachable to a wider audience, we'll start to see an explosion of creativity and innovation.”
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Take action: The Contract for the Web was launched by the inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in Berlin last week. We’ve already signed – will you?
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