Templated
While CrafterCMS is an API-first CMS, it has first-class support for templated (page-based) sites. CrafterCMS embeds FreeMarker to provide a high-performance, clean, flexible, and tolerant of syntax variance, templating engine to render HTML directly from CrafterCMS.
CrafterCMS allows developers to model the content as general reusable items, and fold those into pages. Pages aggregate content from components as needed and are associated with a FreeMarker template that can render the final page. The choice of HTML tools and frameworks doesn’t matter to CrafterCMS. Developers can use whatever front-end technology they want. For development React, Vue, Angular, Flutter or similar SPA, please see here
The use of templated sites as opposed to Headless sites doesn’t detract from CrafterCMS’ full support of building custom APIs. CrafterCMS allows developers to quickly drop a Groovy file that becomes a server-side API and/or REST endpoint. The project being developed can then invoke this API call from FreeMarker or as a REST API call.
Given the freedom available to developers in creating their HTML, CSS, and JS from scratch, concerns like Responsive Design are a non-issue for CrafterCMS. Whatever developers can build in HTML CrafterCMS can happily render, and can augment with in-context and in-place editing for content authors.
Features like workflow, review and approval processes, staging and final go-live are of course all built-in.
Finally, given that CrafterCMS is Git-based, full DevContentOps support is native and fully supports templated sites.
See here for more information on DevContentOps
Available APIs
CrafterCMS supports a number of APIs to access content for templated projects, including:
Custom API
Inheritance
Having content authors enter the same meta-data/content for every content item where it doesn’t change is both laborious and wasteful. It’s best for common meta-data for a section or the whole application to be entered once and inherited by all child items. This is content inheritance, and the implementation in CrafterCMS is very powerful supporting many inheritance mechanisms. More on this here
Security
Securing content access and providing role-based access to different content items or hierarchies is critical to any enterprise-grade content-rich application. It’s critical that the security be implemented at the content API-level. CrafterCMS provides enterprise-grade authentication and authorization mechanics to help achieve this. More on this here
Authentication
CrafterCMS support authentication integration with:
In-Context Editing
CrafterCMS provides an SDK that lets developers focused on a headless use-case add the tools content authors expect, like visual in-context and in-place editing of Web content regardless of the development platform and tools.
More information on Experience Builder here and on the SDK here