5 Benefits of a Composable CMS

In recent years, a new buzzword has entered CMS parlance: ‘composability’. The composable CMS is touted as a middle ground between the headless and traditional CMS, one that offers many of the same benefits of a headless solution while being more down-to-earth in terms of manageability.

The digital world has changed a lot since the invention of the content management system in the late 1990s and the genesis of the world’s go-to CMSs like Drupal, WordPress, and the rest in the early 2000s. While the monolithic CMS pioneered more than two decades ago still survives and is more than adequate for small operations with limited complexity needs, for many companies and organizations it has become wholly inadequate.

In the no-so-distant past, digital marketers only had to drive traffic to their websites and ensure a positive user experience on a single channel. Nowadays, the marketer’s role generally involves pushing content through a multitude of digital channels so that it meets audiences where they’re at and providing an experience tailored to each channel. For this purpose, the traditional CMS has proven to be ill-suited.

The headless CMS was pioneered in the late 2010s in response to the need for a CMS better suited to omnichannel distribution than the traditional CMS. In a headless CMS, the back end is fully disconnected from the frontend, with both typically living on different servers and potentially even created with different programming languages. Such solutions are complex and typically expensive to build because they involve more than one team, and as such they remain the purview of the largest, most complex organizations.

What Makes a CMS Composable?

While there is considerable overlap between headless and composable CMSs, the two are not the same. In short, all composable architectures are headless but not all headless systems are composable. They are the same inasmuch as they both separate the back end from the front, with information transferred to the presentation layer via API, giving both considerable advantages in terms of scalability, speed, and robustness.

What makes a composable system “composable” is its emphasis on the ability to break down complex systems into smaller, isolated, and reusable components that developers can integrate into larger systems. Such components can include content management tools, front-end presentation frameworks, and other API-powered services. Unlike in a pure headless setup where you have to build everything from scratch, a composable setup comes ready with pre-built modular components that can be assembled and customized as one sees fit.

In short, composable architecture provides all the benefits of a pure headless solution while removing some of the complexities and limitations that come with the latter, such as the ability to preview content in WYSIWYG format and the work involved in building components from scratch.

Composable CMS: Key Terminology 

To grasp the technology behind a composable architecture, it's essential to understand some key technological terms. Here are some of the most common ones:

• API – Application programming interface, a set of functions and procedures that enable the creation of applications that access the features or data of an operating system, application, or other service.
• API-first CMS – A content management system whose design is predicated on the development of APIs, where APIs are developed before other code is written.
• Decoupled architecture – A method of building websites or applications wherein the frontend presentation layer is separated from the content management system (see headless CMS).
• DXP – Digital experience platform, defined by Gartner as “an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences.”
• Headless CMS – A back-end-only content management system wherein content is transmitted to an independent presentation layer via API.
• MACH – A digital marketing concept related to composability that stands for microservices, API-first, cloud-based, headless commerce.
• Monolithic CMS – Also known as a “traditional” CMS, this is your standard content management system wherein the front end and back end are inseparable.
• Reusable components – Exactly what you’d think; independent components that are used across different systems or applications, which are software-defined, meaning that they’re programmable and easily controlled and managed.
• Software-defined – The use of software to control hardware functions that are typically the purview of physical hardware such as networking, storage or data center infrastructure.

Composable Architecture: Pros and Cons

A composable CMS is like a Lego model made up of bricks that can be assembled in limitless different ways. There are obvious advantages that come with this. Like with any headless setup, a composable architecture is inherently more flexible and scalable than a traditional CMS, especially when using an open source platform like Drupal, which doesn’t have any built-in caps like many proprietary platforms do. Composable also scores over the pure headless model by being faster to develop through the availability of pre-built components.

Another advantage of composable architecture is the ability to integrate a wide array of digital tools, such as analytics platforms, CRMs, membership portals, human resource platforms, and payment gateways. Composable CMSs also make it easy to customize workflows, create and manage various types of content, and offer seamless multilingual experiences. Its disadvantages are the same as any headless setup, namely a greater upfront cost in terms of labor and money, because it’s an inherently more complex setup than a traditional CMS.

The composable CMS isn’t for everyone. As we emphasized in our blog post about headless CMSs, smaller organizations with less complex needs will probably find the traditional CMS more than adequate. However, if your business is looking to significantly scale up its operations or widen its offerings, a composable solution is likely the solution you’re looking for.

Other Benefits of Composable Architecture

Are you an innovative company or organization that is always looking to improve its digital offerings? If so, you’ll definitely want to consider a composable CMS, or, more accurately, a composable DXP (digital experience platform), because it does more than simply manage content. Traditional CMSs require a lot more upkeep than a composable DXP in terms of updates. By contrast, updates and upgrades to a composable platform are quick and easy, giving your team more time to focus on innovation. 

As with any decoupled system, a composable CMS enables site managers to make changes to the presentation layer without touching the back-end code. In a traditional CMS, even minor changes like font and carousel alterations can be a hassle as they require back-end developer participation. Not so in a composable CMS, where modular components can be easily swapped out, cutting down development time and allowing teams greater flexibility to experiment without fully committing to changes.

Enhanced security is another benefit of a composable or any type of headless CMS as it provides an extra layer of code between the front and back end while also making security updates a quicker process. A further benefit of going composable is the fact that it opens companies and organizations up to a wider developer talent pool, as they’re no longer limited to specialists in a particular CMS like Drupal. Specialists in Next.js or GraphQL are more plentiful than Drupal Twig experts, saving companies time and money.

Composable CMS Success Stories

Cineplex Entertainment

Well before the term “composable” had entered popular parlance, the movie theater giant Cineplex Entertainment had gone in that direction, taking a compartmentalized approach to updating its online infrastructure. Their agile architecture, refined over time, allowed them to not only survive the COVID-19 pandemic (a time when many movie theaters closed their doors) but actually thrive, enabling them to quickly pivot their business model towards e-commerce, online ticketing, and streaming services at a time when in-person movie screenings were impossible.

Icelandair

The Icelandic national air carrier launched a new business department in 2015 aimed at digital transformation. The airline’s transition to a composable architecture allowed them to dramatically streamline their content publishing workflow, enabling them to cut the time it takes to push out promotions by 90 percent. The transformation also allowed them to simplify integrations between the airline and its translation platform, enabling managers to produce translations for 12 languages and 16 locales without ever leaving the CMS.

Samsung Electronics Germany

Samsung Germany’s membership platform was originally created solely as a mobile app, but as the program expanded a web-based version of the app became critical and their existing infrastructure was ill-suited to supporting this. Moving to a headless composable ecosystem enabled them to replicate the mobile app’s UX with a single-page web application. Moving to structured content instead of static, hard-coded pages also cut page updating time in half, resulting in an estimated 15 percent increase in user engagement on frequently updated pages.

Lush

The cosmetics giant Lush began as a mail-order company, making e-commerce a natural transition for the company. Finding their earlier monolithic Drupal site too rigid for their ever-expanding offerings, the company transitioned to a microservices approach, which enabled them to pursue a multichannel approach that was easy to maintain. Adopting API-first architecture eased integration with the company’s critical microservices, the POS system, and native apps and allowed the company to focus on bringing their in-store experience online.

Burberry

The iconic British fashion house found itself increasingly unable to deliver a high-quality e-commerce experience that highlighted multiple collections in multiple languages with its monolithic setup. The company selected a MACH-based approach to guide their investment in e-commerce and personalization technology investment, which vastly improved the speed and agility of the company in responding to new market opportunities.

What We Do

Octahedroid has been working in the composable space, primarily in a Drupal context, since this technology first gained prominence. In the past ten years, we’ve contributed extensively to Drupal with modules such as Drupal Console, Build Hooks, GraphQL Compose, and Decoupled Preview Iframe, which have helped evolve Drupal in the direction of composability. We also have valuable experience in this domain using non-Drupal headless CMS products such as Sanity, Contentful, Hygraph, and Storyblok.

Our extensive experience working with composable CMSs culminated in our development of Composabase, our unified platform that allows you to centralize your data sources into a single GraphQL endpoint that will boost your team's productivity. Composabase makes building composable infrastructure easy, enabling you to effortlessly create a customized back end, unify your business information, connect with popular integrations, and build, test, and deploy a lightning-fast API in a matter of minutes.

Our story working in this space largely parallels the evolution of Drupal as a composable CMS, which has been a gradual simplification of the process, evolving from complex solutions such as Paragraphs + Layouts and Paragraphs and/or a full React app to render Paragraphs as React components to the more simplified approach of using an Iframe. You can read more about our work in this domain in our June 3, 2024 blog post entitled Drupal as a Composable CMS: The Next Generation of Structured Content.

If a composable approach to web development sounds like the solution for you, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us today and ask us about composable architecture, Composabase, or any of the other things discussed here. We would love to optimize your web infrastructure and enable you to focus more on your core business areas rather than worry about the limitations of your CMS.

And if you want to learn more about composable architecture, read our article on Drupal as a Composable CMS here.