A headless CMS is a powerful way to manage content through an API-first, presentation agnostic approach. Yet many companies find that thanks to the nature of their business venturing beyond what the CMS can do out-of-the-box is suggested. This is where custom middleware and backend logic come into play. By adding a layer of custom services, data transformation and business logic between the CMS and the front end, teams can extend functionality, apply logic that makes operations too complicated or too intricate for out-of-the-box options while making smarter, more complex digital solutions. In the end, this customizes a content ecosystem without losing the flexibility and modularity of a headless CMS in the first place.
What is Middleware in a Headless CMS?
Middleware is essentially anything that exists between your headless CMS and the services or applications that require access to data produced by the CMS. Middleware can assist in facilitating API calls from the CMS to ensure transformed returns meet the needs of various front-end applications, drive downstream applications that need to capture data created by the CMS, or empower enhanced functionality required through third-party APIs. Attend a Storyblok webinar to learn best practices for integrating middleware into a headless CMS workflow for greater flexibility and performance. Middleware works to transform the response intended for the CMS based on what’s necessary for the clients, provide aggregation from various potential data sources, and apply local intelligence before sending the data. This layer of abstraction allows developers to maintain a clean separation while infusing business-oriented logic into the rendering process.
What Business Logic Can Be Added to Content Delivery?
Every company has its own operations and projects that might require more than what a typical frontend, backend or CMS experience would provide. Middleware allows you to add custom processes for what your needs might be. For instance, a retailer may have middleware that checks stock levels in another application before rendering product data for any SKU. Meanwhile, a publisher may create middleware logic that renders published articles differently than draft articles, based on the roles of an editor. These behind-the-scenes decisions do not frustrate content editors who would otherwise remain oblivious to these accept/reject features, and the customer-facing experience can be adjusted accordingly to meet business goals.
What Third-Party Access and Integrations Can Middleware Provide?
Every business uses various applications to successfully operate their business analytics platforms, personalization engines, search functionalities, ecommerce applications and more. While a headless CMS may not necessarily provide direct access to such capabilities, middleware can be the bridge to allow developers access to such human and digital services. For example, middleware can aggregate relevant information in the CMS and a CRM before sending it to the front end. Or it could aggregate blog posts in a headless CMS and other posts in a third-party content aggregation site. This level of integration provides additional intelligence and fluidity to the customer-facing experience, ensuring that no content exists in a vacuum when it requires other services from which to operate.
Creating Custom APIs to Extend What the CMS Can Do
Just because a headless CMS exposes everything it does behind the scenes via APIs and makes them available for access and content creation doesn’t mean that the usefulness of all CMS actions and data hierarchies is overt. Middleware can act as a custom-created application that taps into all the exposed APIs for a custom endpoint with additional logic or layers of abstraction. This is useful for when external applications or front-end developers need a very specialized endpoint for their systems to work correctly. Developers can build the endpoint requirements, data in/out requirements, and access privileges so that every application gets exactly what it needs and nothing more and does not overexpose information or make other users aware of unnecessarily complex layers.
Caching and Performance Management
Middleware exists to help with performance mostly, caching. Since APIs are the way users gain access to CMS content, every request is a burden on resources on both the CMS side and the network. Middleware can facilitate caching server-side, edge, in-memory to avoid load times and avoid repeated requests from hitting the CMS. It can also decide when to clear caches after going live to ensure what’s needed is as fresh as it can be when it counts. This all translates into better load times, increased scalability, and a positive experience for everyone across digital touchpoints.
Access Control and Security Compliance
When making sensitive content available via APIs, access to CMS data must be secure. Middleware offers another layer of access control to where permission, authentication, and authorization, along with request validation, can happen before content is revealed. Middleware can serve as excellent compliance for access controls crafted by developers based on user role, request type (frontend versus backend), and organizational security policies. It can ensure that sensitive PII is kept under wraps and unpublished content is never sent through middleware to the front. With consistent compliance at this layer, teams do not have to change their CMS or worry about security during editorial processes to make safe access happen. Constructing security compliance via middleware ensures that sensitive information stays behind closed doors at all times even when the content is being used.
Multi-Tenant/White-Label Capabilities
When organizations operate multiple brands or clients or serve international regions but wish to maintain a single CMS installation, middleware can differentiate and customize access to content. Developers can set the middleware to allow specific filtering based on tenant ID, subdomain or user role allowing each frontend to receive only specific data applicable to that brand without needing multiple installations of the backend. This feature makes it easy to scale multi-tenant approaches and allow for a white-label solution where the same content service can service entirely different branded solutions on the frontend. Middleware ensures tenants get their solution without the security risk of seeing someone else’s unintended content.
Custom Analytics and Error Management
Middleware supports any custom analytics and error management as well. Since it sits between the CMS and other systems, it can send information API calls and responses, during-call lags and error codes and messages to a desired analytics endpoint. This visibility will help developers debug, troubleshoot and audit interactions. Wouldn’t it be good to know which API calls were taking too long? Setting analytics for call successes vs. failures or using the middleware layer to give custom error messages instead of default documentation-driven errors can also lead to better experiences. Implementing better failure tolerance through feedback makes it worthwhile to work with the middleware.
Scales via Events
Finally, middleware can handle things that cannot be done during a request by scaling content operations via an event-driven approach. The headless CMS can notify the middleware layer via webhooks when something has happened for example, documenting, deletion, updates or publishing. Such activities can then trigger asynchronous requests in middleware to let the rest of the infrastructure know things have changed and trigger downstream actions. For example, when a blog post is published, it can invoke a request to notify search engines to update and clear a cache or notify a recommendation service and these are all separate from things done during a dedicated request with middleware in place. This can make headless systems more dynamic by making them more responsive over time.
Future-Proofing Architecture with Modular Extensibility
Perhaps the greatest advantage of a middleware and headless CMS approach is the ability to create a modular, extensible architecture that supports change over time. When new platforms, technologies or business needs arise, middleware allows teams to plug in new services or switch out legacy systems without rearchitecting the entire CMS. This plug-and-play approach encourages future development with a stable core that is easier to maintain. Since logic is abstracted out into layers, developers can become comfortable in upgrading, refactoring or extending certain functionality with little disruption to content experiencing operations.
Scalability of Advanced Personalization
For brands needing to be competitive in content creation, personalization is a must. Middleware serves as the ideal layer at which branded user-specific logic can take place, pulling in real-time from CRMs, analytics platforms and customer data platforms (CDPs) for on-the-spot response generation.
Whether that means changed copy based on geographic locations, behavior patterns or purchased products when a user is logged in or all three custom middleware enables businesses to execute personalized experiences at scale without burdening their CMS or negatively affecting front-end performance.
Innovation through Experimentation on the Backend
Finally, because middleware naturally decouples the traditional CMS experience, it encourages innovation. If developers get a good idea or a prototype for a feature or need to create an API or transform data, they can do so within middleware without placing the CMS structure at risk. This fosters a healthy culture of innovation and constant improvement where good ideas can be explored quickly and effectively. Since middleware acts as a digital sandbox for all backend innovation, it allows teams to push boundaries and test their ideas to create new features that won’t disrupt those using live systems.
Conclusion: Empowering Customization Without Compromising Agility
The option to extend a headless CMS with middleware and backend logic offers a level of flexibility, control, and intelligence that out-of-the-box solutions simply cannot provide. As consumers rely on digital engagement more and more and backend systems and integrations grow in number across the enterprise, middleware becomes that integration point, that control point, that customized point of all-time possibility. This is a mandate for development teams to dictate data flows across systems and within CMS operations to produce the most nuanced, contextual digital experiences.
Middleware means a more refined experience of exactly what content should be delivered when and to whom. Does certain content only need to show up for certain classifications of consumers? Should something that gets output from a CMS query be an input into an entirely different application? Should a particular decision made by one user trigger a different experience perhaps for the admin down the line? Middleware can control all of this without placing the burden on editors or on the CMS itself. The business logic resides where it should in a service that can be sustained, assessed, and implemented independently.
Moreover, to extend the CMS with middleware does not challenge the favorable tenets of working with a headless architecture to begin with. Middleware inherently recognizes the division of labor and does not confuse the modular separation applied to the CMS; instead, it fosters it. It will not disrupt content structures and editorial maneuvers to get activated; it merely adds another layer of logic that can be programmed against business objectives. Just because content delivery should happen, for example, because you have a headless CMS, does not mean it will. Middleware helps it happen through the appropriate channels, at the right time for the right consumer.
For mission-critical applications where a comprehensive level of flexibility is required to balance speed vs. sophistication, agility vs. governance, scale vs. accuracy, this is how to truly operationalize a headless CMS. A future-ready operation transcends merely enhancing an entire new way to integrate digital experiences far more than monolith tools can achieve, where the integrity of the whole CDN structure works on its own relative merits for real-time performance needs and where every high-performing engagement for the consumer can be scalable and intelligent from Day One.
