Content Management Systems (CMS) have been around for a long time but they’ve mostly been focused on web publishing.
More recently though, a category called a ‘headless CMS’ has emerged, in which the content can be managed through a dashboard and the data is made available through an API.
We recently started using a system called Strapi for some Live Ops features.
There’s a cloud-hosted version available for $99/month, but the source is available and it’s pretty simple to run on an Azure/AWS/ Google virtual machine. By default it uses a simple sqlite database, but you can scale it up and configure it to use (for example) an external MySQL database, and cloud storage providers such as S3 to host large assets.
Screenshots below are for the demo that you can sign up for
The basics:
You use the content type builder to define content types, which can share custom components and have relationships between each other:
There’s a media library for uploading images/videos/audio
And then in the Content Manager you create instances of content types
Finally, the data is available through a REST API that returns JSON. It’s simple to fetch this in Defold with http.request and process it with json.decode