Prismic.io - Content Management for The Masses

Generally, all Content Management Systems are tightly integrated into the websites they control to serve one key function: publish custom content. Almost as one singular entity. From the moment you choose a CMS, you shall be forever locked down by its required platform and technology.

So in terms of the CMS world, nothing revolutionary has happened to change our perception otherwise...until now...

I have been doing some research into some content management systems that sits externally from a platform (such as a website), giving you freedom to manage the content however you like and it something that's gaining a lot of traction. I am starting to see why.  In fact, I'm in the middle of building a site using one of these "externally" managed CMS platforms.

I would say the the main market players are Contentful and Prismic. They both are very similar in the features they provide and do a great job in delivering content to a platform of your choice through simply querying their native API's to return a nice JSON feed. So from a development perspective, they're both just as easy to integrate as each another and the deciding factors on the one you choose will primarily be:

• Price
• Ease of use
• Editor features

Based on these factors alone, I found Prismic to be the ideal candidate to fulfill my clients needs and adding content was a pleasure. It probably has the nicest interface I've seen in a long time. Very quick, easy and has something Contentful didn't have: a nice WYSIWYG editor. The markdown editor alone in Contentful was a deal breaker and I feared it would add an additional learning curve for non-technical clients.

The only strange thing I noticed about Prismic was that you cannot add any form of validation or set a field to be required. Hopefully, this is something they will add to future releases. When you have other great features like an easy image upload to Amazon Cloud for resizing and cropping, having no validation isn't all that important. :-)

I am already more than halfway through my first Prismic managed website and the implementation couldn't be easier with the help of their forum and starter projects in the technology of your choice.

One of the fears I did have whilst implementing Prismic was how well will my pages load on high demand, especially when the content itself is external from the website. Would there be issues or delays in sending content to my platform? I guess this question is still yet to be answered. So far, the page speed has been better than expected (based on initial testing).

Prismic in a nutshell (stolen from their website):

prismic.io is a developer friendly, API-based approach to CMS. It features a Writing Room for content writers to author, manage and store content, and a Content Query API for developers to integrate managed content. Your content doesn't live "in a website / in websites", your project doesn't live "in a CMS"; rather, your content lives in one place and is shared across your websites, and your project lives absolutely anywhere you want.