What is a Universal CMS?

If you’ve been following the CMS industry for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with the variety of terms used to describe content management systems. 

The way the CMS has been described over the years, from monolithic CMS and digital experience platform (DXP) to composable CMS, headless CMS, hybrid CMS, MACH, and several other terms, has caused much debate and sometimes confusion for potential buyers. 

The latest of these is the universal CMS. Initially coined by Preston So, others in the industry, including Boye & Co, have begun to use the term and dig deeper into its meaning. But is this a new beginning or just another industry marketing ploy and buzzword?

At CrafterCMS, we consider ourselves an enterprise-grade headless “plus” CMS (i.e., an API-first headless content platform plus several additional features needed by enterprises). While there are many similarities with the concept of a universal CMS, we’ll explain additional capabilities that CrafterCMS offers to meet the needs of today’s large enterprises and scaling startups. 

Explaining the Universal CMS Concept

The universal CMS creates a new equilibrium that restores the balance between developers and content editors and treats both parties as first-class citizens. With the universal CMS, content and developer teams are meant to be empowered instead of feeling handicapped by the limitations of the pure headless CMS or traditional CMS, respectively. 

Originally, monolithic CMSs allowed content authors to create and edit content for the web with ease. However, with the proliferation of new content channels, pure headless CMSs arose to deliver content to those channels and provide developers with more flexibility and freedom to build frontends using their preferred frameworks. 

Unfortunately, this also meant that content authors were suddenly relegated to being second-class citizens and unable to easily edit and preview content using a visual interface like with a monolithic or traditional CMS. 

According to Boye & Co, the concept of universal CMS isn’t meant to be just another way to say hybrid-headless CMS (which offers headless functionality and the content authoring features of a traditional CMS). Instead, it speaks about a convergence where formerly monolithic CMSs add API-first and headless capabilities, while pure headless CMSs add visual editing and other features. The term represents a future state where both types of CMSs offer similar functionality.

“Universal CMS as a term draws inspiration from ‘Universal JavaScript’, which is JavaScript that works in every environment, as in JavaScript that runs on both the client and the server. To put it in bullets, a Universal CMS is:

• Tech-agnostic (any framework) → universally developable

• Omnichannel (multimodal) → universally editable 

• Stack-agnostic (any infra) → universally deployable 

• AI-enabled (any atomic unit) → universally generable."
  
  --Boye & Co.

The Truth About the Universal CMS Concept

There is nothing wrong with the concept of a universal CMS as a potential new term to describe the converging of traditional and pure headless CMSs towards a similar CMS architecture. However, for companies weighing various CMS options today, some factors should be noted. 

Impossible to Serve Everyone Using One Type of CMS

Content management systems are meant to serve several different personas, and each group has its own incentives and priorities. While developers and marketers are the most prominent groups that use the CMS, others, including sales, designers, compliance, operations, and others, will have their own use cases.

While some vendors may continue to innovate and add new features to a point of convergence, many others will remain the same. Ultimately, as often happens today, customers will need to select the tools that best suit their needs, whether that means a tool for a mid-market enterprise with a large content authoring team or another that is more technical for a startup heavily dependent on developers rather than expect one tool to perform every task exactly as they would like.

At the end of the day, some customers will love a product, while for others, it will never be the right fit.

Universal CMS Is Not Much Different From Hybrid Headless

Pure headless vendors may now be adding visual editing tools, and monolithic vendors may be incorporating headless functionality and APIs. Yet, more advanced headless CMSs, such as CrafterCMS, have been offering the balance that most enterprises need for a long time and will continue to innovate to meet new expectations rather than just converge toward the mean.

What CrafterCMS Offers Beyond the Universal CMS

Pure headless CMSs may now be adding the features that content authors have demanded for years and traditional CMSs are making it easier for developers to work with their preferred tools. However, platforms that offer the right balance today and can continue to build on those established capabilities will continue to be ahead of the curve.

CrafterCMS is an enterprise-grade headless CMS that companies can use to build large-scale, high-performance, ultra-secure sites and apps. CrafterCMS offers a comprehensive “headless plus” set of capabilities that empowers authors, software developers, and DevOps teams to innovate faster and collaborate better. Here’s a few ways how it goes beyond the concept of the universal CMS:

Visual Content Authoring

CrafterCMS offers visual content authoring via the headless app Crafter Studio. Content authors can leverage drag and drop and WYSIWYG editing for a user-friendly experience. However, Crafter Studio can also be customized to suit your needs and offers a forms engine for form-based editing as well as interfaces for editing various use cases, including headless use cases such as digital signage which might use forms, or Alexa Skills and its voice interface which has no web interface but still requires a way to manage facts and skills. 

Built-in Marketing Capabilities

CrafterCMS includes several built-in functionalities that pure headless CMSs are now trying to add, including search, content targeting and personalization, and video management and delivery. Plus, with CrafterCMS’s composable architecture, companies can add other features and capabilities via API integrations or plugins in the CrafterCMS Marketplace.

DevContentOps

CrafterCMS caters not only to developers and marketers but also to operations. CrafterCMS extends the advantages of DevOps to content-driven applications, products, and digital experiences through its unique DevContentOps support. 

This approach allows for seamless collaboration between content and development teams. Code can be deployed from development to production, and content can be synced back with simple push and pull operations. With DevContentOps, your teams can efficiently publish content updates, release new software features, and deliver compelling customer experiences without the delays common in other headless and traditional CMSs.

Push Publishing

While many pure headless CMSs offer pull-only publishing where content gets pulled from a database, CrafterCMS can push content to a wide variety of digital channels. This allows content creators to deliver their content from the authoring environment to one or more target delivery environments seamlessly. This feature ensures that content updates, new pages / components, or media assets are pushed to the live site or other digital touchpoints in a controlled and efficient manner. 

With CrafterCMS's decoupled architecture, push publishing can be configured to meet specific publishing workflows. This makes CrafterCMS ideal for enterprises that require robust content delivery across diverse platforms.

Server-Side Rendering Support

Unlike many pure headless CMS platforms that only support client-side rendering, CrafterCMS also offers server-side rendering (SSR). This includes Groovy and Java and seamlessly integrates with the latest frameworks and JavaScript-based SSR platforms, such as Node.js, Next.js, and Nuxt.js. CrafterCMS also provides native support for HTML5 sites via Freemarker templating (SSR), allowing for rapidly creating microsites, landing pages, and other web experiences.

Flexible Hosting

CrafterCMS offers deployment flexibility, allowing it to be hosted on-premises or in private and public clouds, including major cloud providers like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Crafter Cloud delivers a private SaaS/PaaS experience built on AWS for enterprises seeking a fully managed solution, providing an agile, cost-effective, high-performance, and secure CMS.

Git-based Content Repository

CrafterCMS's content authoring platform is built on the Git distributed version control system. By utilizing a Git-based repository, CrafterCMS offers developers advanced workflow support, feature branching, and more. Meanwhile, content authoring teams benefit from sophisticated multi-file versioning, auditing, and security features provided by Git—without needing to understand the technical details. This Git-based architecture enables CrafterCMS to level up traditional features offered by pure headless CMS platforms, including versioning and workflows. 

Security, Scalability and Cost-Effectiveness

CrafterCMS’s characteristics, including its decoupled architecture, server-side support, built-in search engine and vector database (for GenAI), and DevContentOps approach, enable greater security, scalability, and cost-effectiveness as it delivers first-class support for all three primary constituents in the content management ecosystem (marketers and other content authors, developers, and operations).

Learn more about what CrafterCMS offers with a trial of Crafter Enterprise today.