SoCreate Gets a Lesson on New Headless CMS ‘Prismic’

Our latest Lunch Meet, a team-led learning series for which the team gathers monthly, was of particular interest to me as a content manager. Our Chief Software Engineer Jami Lurock presented an overview of Prismic, a “headless” content management system that’s powering the content of the all-new SoCreate.it.

Unlike Wordpress or Umbraco, where the developer themes on the platform that’s already built and uses the language the platform has chosen, a “headless” CMS is simply an API. The front end of the website can be developed in any language you want, which in our case, is Angular. Jami compared the process to the JAMstack trend (JavaScript, APIs, Markup).

All of this is very exciting for a web developer, and even more exciting for me as someone who is working hard to develop timely content for writers in EIGHT localized languages. That’s English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Hindi, Chinese, and Japanese. Count ‘em. This headless CMS allows us to more easily and quickly translate all the content through an improved workflow.

Better yet, it allows me (non-developer) to create and manage pages without having to rely on our UX team for assistance. And I can be sure it’s going to look beautiful on the front end because every element is added via a “slice,” and every “slice” has its place based within the predesigned content type I choose (for example, a repeatable blog post, career page, etc.). Quotes, image libraries, videos and more appear where they’re supposed to, without my finagling for various screen sizes and responsiveness.  

Rigid templates are a thing of the past with Prismic. It also gives us the ability to schedule “releases” of content and roll those back if needed. Not to mention, the user experience is SO. SIMPLE.

There are a few drawbacks for someone who likes structure (you guessed it, I like structure!), perhaps the biggest being the lack of a treemap that helps me understand where content is falling on the front end of the site. Instead, it’s just one big repository of pages. But the brilliant SoCreate team has found a workaround, and maybe Prismic will add one of its own at some point. We beat them to the punch!

Prismic has been around for a few years now, but big names like Netflix and Google are just starting to use it. We like to be at the front of that bell-curve, too.

Did I mention Prismic is rapid-fast? I am looking forward to churning out more great content more quickly than before to meet the needs of the writing community.

Streamlining for success,