Strapi is an open-source headless CMS, and comes in three flavors: open-source Community Edition, self-hosted paid Enterprise Edition and fully managed Strapi Cloud. There is a marketplace for adding various integrations and plugins to enhance the base feature set.
Strapi includes powerful features to support structured yet flexible content via Content Types Builder, granular access controls via Roles and Permissions, multiple languages via Internationalization, and advanced media management via its Media Library. Strapi is targeted toward developers, content managers, and business teams alike. They have a community forum for answering questions, a support portal for paid support from the Strapi team, and many solution partners for professional services.
How can I use Strapi?
Strapi is a 100% Javascript, developer-first, headless, content management system (CMS) and is used to create dynamic content for websites and apps. It uses content types to categorize different kinds of content and allows each content type to have its schema or data structure.
Strapi supports single content types and collection content types, and it also supports relation fields to create relations between content types as well.
Strapi can be extended to use custom fields like Google maps, products from Shopify, videos from YouTube, calendars, color pickers, and many more.
The data is stored in any one of the supported databases: SQLite, MySQL, Postgres, or MariaDB. Once the data is created, stored in a database, and published, the data can be accessed via a REST or GraphQL API. The client application or website can then consume the REST or GraphQL API to display the content. The API is protected by authentication and permissions so only people with roles can consume the API and access the content.
Advantages of using Strapi
The biggest advantage of using Strapi CMS is that all the content is managed separately outside the website or applications code base, and can be easily managed by non-technical content managers. Ever go back to a developer to update the phone number or welcome message on your website? Well, with a CMS, you can do it yourself using the Strapi CMS user interface. Different pages on your site can use different content types and manage them at a central location irrespective of how the content is styled or displayed.
Strapi provides an intuitive user interface with built-in sorting and filtering, allowing easy management of SEO metadata, media management capabilities, and internationalization.
Strapi also supports integrations with major service providers like Algolia, SendGrid, Mailgun, Redis, Sentry, etc. via plugins.
Go check out Strapi and it’s open source!
Check out the Part 1 article on How to create a Strapi CMS app to manage content, and the part 2 article on How to Programmatically Manage Website Content Using Strapi CMS.
If you have questions or feedback, please let me know in the comments below.