Oracle Content Management As a Headless CMS

Oracle Content Management can be used as a powerful and flexible back-end content management system (CMS) in the cloud. It's built from the ground up as a central content hub that makes content accessible through REST APIs for publication in any context or display on any device.

There are two fundamental perspectives to look at Oracle Content Management: content management and content delivery. The following diagram shows a logical view of the overall architecture.

Description of the illustration headless_architecture.png

Content Management

Oracle Content Management offers many tools for effective content management, which involves content definition, creation, collaboration, approval, and administration. All this can be done from a variety of user interfaces (web browser, mobile apps, Microsoft Office, desktop app), and this is how content authors mostly experience the product.

When you sign in to Oracle Content Management as a content author, you'll typically manage your content and collaborate with other people from any of the clients. You can add assets, manage assets, share assets with other people, or have context-specific conversations on individual assets. You can also get insight into what content is being authored, how it's being published, and what workflows it's in through content analytics dashboards.

Oracle Content Management also provides management interfaces that allow content and system administrators to perform system administrative and monitoring tasks.

Different roles can be assigned to users to control what they can do in the content management environment, and workflows may be in place to guide the content creation and management processes.

Oracle Content Management can handle all kinds of content, including digital assets, structured content, rich media, and content assets. Assets can be stored in repositories, where they can be categorized using taxonomies and accessed for further processing. The structure and interdependencies of all content are captured in the content model, which basically defines the content management environment.

Even though Oracle Content Management offers front-end user interfaces to manage content, all management operations can also be accomplished programmatically, through a set of management REST APIs. The content management user interfaces use these management APIs. These APIs are available to you as well for performing integrations, data massaging, or any other data manipulation needs.

Content Delivery

Content delivery is another important aspect of Oracle Content Management. This is all about getting content to end users, such as website visitors or app users. These are the content consumers.

Once content is authored and has gone through an approval process, it can be published, which makes it available for websites and apps to use. Published content is made available to clients in read-only format through a set of RESTful application program interfaces (APIs).

Publishing content involves a certain set of policies (checks and balances) and a logical notion of a destination or channel. Content can be published to many channels at the same time. It's also possible to withdraw content from a channel by unpublishing it. The acts of publishing and unpublishing alter the visibility of content in a particular context.

Content delivery as such doesn't have a user interface in Oracle Content Management. However, published content is visible in the management interfaces. It’s useful to think of published content as read-only copies of assets in the management perspective.

All content delivery can be done programmatically, through a set of delivery REST APIs. This allows you to develop websites and applications using Oracle Content Management as a "headless" back-end content management system (CMS). Several tutorials are available to get you started with various technologies.