What is a CMS?
A CMS (content management system) is the tool that lets you change the words, images, and pages on a website without editing code.
The idea#
A website is code plus content. The code decides how things look and behave; the content is the text, images, and data that fill it. A CMS separates the two so that a marketer can update a headline or publish a blog post through a friendly editing screen, while the code stays untouched. Without one, every copy change is a request to a developer.
Traditional vs headless#
A traditional CMS like WordPress stores the content and renders the website in one system. A headless CMS (Sanity, Strapi, Directus, Payload, and others) only stores and serves the content, and a separate front-end (often built by an AI builder or a framework like Next.js) renders it. Headless is the common shape for modern AI-built sites because the builder owns the front-end.
How Weblooks works with CMSes#
Weblooks connects to the four most-requested headless CMSes through adapters (see the CMS adapters article), so copy edited on the canvas writes back to the CMS in one round trip. Projects hosted on Weblooks can also use the built-in native CMS: collections, entries, and assets managed inside Weblooks, with no third-party account needed.