Headless CMS approach
Updates Development CMS Front-end
We have decided to separate the Content Management System (CMS) and front-end web pages into two layers: using Craft CMS as a Headless CMS which is only used to manage content and a Symfony application to deliver front-end pages. We believe this will be more efficient for the long-term development of w3.org.
Benefits include:
- Symfony is already used to deliver web pages for W3C so is a familiar technology (it’s also a well established and powerful PHP framework)
- Craft CMS has good support for GraphQL API to help expose content managed in the CMS
- Many pages are created by a variety of different data sources, both from the CMS and other sources
- There is a desire to have an efficient single platform on the front-end to help with future maintenance
- The Headless CMS approach gives a nice separation of concerns, simplifying the CMS side and helping us focus on delivering only what matters on the front-end
- Security and Performance - we only develop what we need on the front-end so can optimize this for security and performance better than a general-purpose CMS
- Flexibility - this also means W3C can use different CMS systems in the future, without having to rebuild the entire frontend
A Symfony front-end application will deliver the working web pages, the “frontend”. This application reads content in from Craft, which acts as a Headless CMS, and other data sources as required. Content is passed to the template layer, and web pages are rendered via the Twig templating system.
You can find out more about what a headless CMS is.