Our shiny new blog has just been installed so we thought we would kick off with a roundup of the TypedCMS story so far, and a sneak preview of what’s happening next.

What is TypedCMS?

TypedCMS is online software which makes it enjoyable and efficient to manage, store and deliver content to a website or any other digital platform.  

It achieves this by moving the content management system away from the website so the content structure and ongoing updates are unimpeded.  This “separation of concerns” unleashes exciting new opportunities for developers, content creators, and website visitors.  

Most importantly these benefits add up to huge gains for business owners and their bottom line.

TypedCMS is often referred to as a “headless content management system”. This is a term derived from chopping the head (front end website or application) off the body (back-end CMS).

Why Should You Care?

TypedCMS is the first and only headless CMS with standards compliance at its heart, and currently the only viable British headless CMS.

It offers many important benefits and they kick in before a website or application has even been built. The positive impact of choosing TypedCMS can be felt across all these areas:

• Build cost and timing
• SEF (search engine friendliness) and performance
• SEO (search engine optimisation)
• User experience
• Content management
• Security
• Maintenance
• Cost and speed of future upgrades

Over the past few years we have been busy prioritising features which allow TypedCMS users to follow cutting edge industry practices to gain an advantage.

Content First

Content-first design is where the content for your project determines the design of the website.

TypedCMS empowers developers to design content structures and relationships which truly reflect the structure of a business and how it functions.  It does this through its unique and powerful content blueprint mechanism.

Something as specific as a camping trailer, business or member’s benefit for a club can be modelled and represented with a tailored blueprint rather than being forced into a generic product or service format. Relationships between content can be mapped with relational field types.

While this approach may on the face of it sound more time consuming at the build stage the opposite is in fact true.

Focus on What’s Important

As a completely web-based SaaS (Software as a Service) TypedCMS reduces, and in many cases completely eliminates, the need for back-end development and infrastructure requirements.  

This keeps down costs for business and means developers can focus on the two things that really matter:

• Making sure your audience can find you
• Ensuring their impression of you will be favourable

TypedCMS is therefore compatible with the “content first” mantra of website or application development.  Why does this matter?  

Rather than shoehorning content into an “empty vessel”, template website, the focus from day one is on the audience and messaging.  TypedCMS blueprints ensure a website is built to serve its content (and therefore audience), not the other way around.  

We have also built TypedCMS to be JSON API specification compliant, which helps increase productivity, conformity and best practices.  Crucially for developers it also opens up a plethora of high quality code libraries and tooling which also conforms to the specification.

Performance Matters

Website visitors make their mind up very quickly when visiting a website and are likely to go elsewhere if a website loads slowly.  Google’s algorithms quite rightly penalise slow loading websites.

One of the many ways in which TypedCMS can help with performance is through our Laravel starter kit which inherently supports caching out of the box.  

Alternatively you could build a completely static website using the JamStack architectural pattern to deliver ultimate performance.

This can significantly boost the speed of a site especially during periods of high traffic. This is important when email marketing or social media campaigns create high traffic peaks, or where broadband/mobile coverage is poor.

Teamwork Shouldn't be Hard Work

When focused developers, empowered marketers and engaged business owners collaborate they need access to different content and CMS features to form an effective team.

With TypedCMS team members can be assigned Team Roles, and with our comprehensive access control system you can also assign granular permissions for Project Roles.

There is no limit to the number of members in a team and it's easy for an administrator to invite new collaborators - even when they are not yet an existing TypedCMS user.

Security

All TypedCMS users are able to take advantage of both secure password authentication and two factor authentication which we encourage them to use.

Content from TypedCMS is pushed to a website via its API.  If you are a non-techie, think of this as like Morse code sent over a dedicated channel and secured with several very long passwords which can be changed at intervals to suit you.  

The underlying technology here is called OAuth 2.0, and it is cleverly  designed to share information between online services without exposing passwords.

TypedCMS therefore provides access to best in class tools and mechanisms to help you reduce exposure to “attack vectors” and “bad actors” compared to a monolithic website or application.

Meanwhile, back-end updates are taken care of by our development team, and TypedCMS support can help with anything from basic queries through to developer on-boarding.

Content Management and SEO

Well managed website content helps refine user experience, improve visitor engagement and of course underpins SEO.   These crucial benefits have led us to refine the user interface for TypedCMS many times over, based on user observation and customer feedback.  

All of this matters a great deal because of basic human nature. A website or application which is enjoyable to update will naturally receive more updates, consume less time and the quality of updates will likely be a lot higher.  

It follows that this will help grow traffic, improve visitor engagement and reduce administrative overheads.

The Journey So Far

From day one, TypedCMS has been built working closely with real life businesses and their customers.  They have been crucial in helping us decide which features to prioritise, to offer a great user experience from day one.

Many of our early adopters are local, Wiltshire based military veterans turned entrepreneurs. We are especially grateful for their trust, insights and feedback, much of which is already baked into the TypedCMS platform.

Describing all the great things TypedCMS can do as of today is beyond the scope of a single blog post but here are a few highlights.

Blueprints for Success

The TypedCMS content blueprint mechanism is the star of the show and is already supported by 25 district field types which are themselves highly configurable.   Organising and getting content where it’s needed are what TypedCMS do best.  

Collections based on blueprints allow subsets of content entities (called constructs) to be filtered and sorted from within TypedCMS. This can reduce the development needed and offer more granular control over content.

Team Principles 

A TypedCMS team can manage unlimited projects. Switching between teams and projects is intuitive and whatever you are working on is visually signposted using a logo mark or picture of your choice.

Team roles are built in for administrators, content architects and authors.  This simplifies on-boarding while allowing more granular permissions for authors if needed.  Author’s roles can be further refined at a project level.

Free accounts are available for users who are not website owners.  This means that developers and content contributors invited to join an existing TypedCMS project have zero on-boarding costs.

Our comprehensive web hooks system allows granular control of when and how content updates are fired off to a website or application (based on content updates or time triggers).  These are supported by reactive fields which allow content updates to occur in the future and in some cases at regular intervals.

Most Recent Developments

Our most recent developments have focused on making the management of content even more flexible and intuitive.

Conditional Fields 

Conditional fields allow other fields to be displayed or hidden depending on the value of another field.  This for example allows the developer to keep the user interface simple for day to day content tasks, but opens up other fields when more advanced or less frequent tasks need to be performed.

Hierarchies

Hierarchies are a powerful tool for organising content into tree-like structures and are especially important for developers and marketers building complex and scale-able product category or menu trees.

Inline Media Embeds

Inline media embeds allow content contributors to simply drop a link into a rich text editor (RTE) to embed and preview snippets from popular media platforms such as Twitter, Spotify or YouTube.  Support for a number of platforms is available and each RTE instance can be configured individually.

Our Aspirations for the Future

So what’s next for TypedCMS?

Features

We continue to grow the TypedCMS feature set apace as work to make the enterprise ready intensifies.

We currently expect new productivity features embracing media, drafts, previews and workflows to ship in 2023.

Upgrades and improvements to the API will naturally continue to follow the JSON API specification.

Tooling

We are currently working hard to bring you more starter kits, SDKs and tutorials and to improve documentation.  A new release is imminent and will be notified via our mailing list.

Providing free, high quality tooling for developers, is something the TypedCMS development team are passionate about.

Testing and Stability 

Testing, stability and security are always top of mind and positive results while encouraging will never be taken as an indicator of future success.  

What Price Freedom?

We believe pricing models which offer free tariffs for inadequate feature sets, subsidised by jacked up fees for SMEs and enterprises are:

• Economically nonviable in the longer term
• A barrier to new projects and fledgling businesses rather than a help
• An impediment to the professional development of the industry and its developers

This more sustainable approach to pricing will benefit all TypedCMS users, and will continue to be based on these principles:

• All projects and teams benefit from the FULL TypedCMS feature set
• Content contributors and developers can be on-boarded free of charge
• TypedCMS has sustainable revenue to keep developing the platform and free developer tooling

Please sign up to our newsletter for upcoming pricing announcements.

Become Part of the Journey

As we enter the next phase of development for TypedCMS we will continue to work closely with developers, marketers, content creators and business owners who understand what it takes to sustain an advantage online.  

If you would like to find out more about being part of the journey, we would love to hear from you.  Alternatively sign up to our newsletter, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to stay up to date with new developments.