With Umbraco Headless, Can We Streamline the Development Process?

Absolutely! By integrating certain traditional development tasks into the requirements phase, we can reduce friction as we transition to the development phase, ultimately shortening the overall project timeline.

Traditional Content Management Project Delivery Process

A typical content management project usually follows these steps:

1. Strategy: Determining what to build.
2. Design: Deciding how it will look.
3. Requirements: Planning how to implement it.
4. Front-end Development: Converting high-quality designs into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
5. Back-end Development: Constructing document structures to hold the content data and adapting the front-end code to the content management system.
6. Deployment/Release

The Typical Requirements Phase

During the requirements phase, aside from integration details, the focus is usually on defining the types of web pages and components that will be built. This includes specifying fields and their definitions. For example, a "50/50 Image" component might have the following fields:

1. Title: Text, max length 70, required
2. Sub Title: Text, max length 200
3. Description: Rich text, light format
4. Image: Image with media breakpoints

Moving Document Type Creation to the Requirements Phase

Traditionally, after agreeing on the requirements, the project moves to front-end development, followed by back-end development. It's often during the back-end phase that mismatches between requirements and the CMS capabilities are discovered, leading to changes, rework, and costly change requests.

By moving document type creation to the requirements phase, especially with Umbraco, we can address these mismatches early. This process involves:

1. Standing up an Umbraco Cloud instance on the Starter tier.
2. Defining components in Umbraco during the requirements phase. The time investment is minimal and does not significantly increase costs.

Benefits of Early Document Type Creation

• Identifying Gaps Early: Recognize if certain requirements cannot be met by out-of-the-box fields and plan accordingly, either by foregoing some features or planning custom development.
• Providing a Sandbox for Front-End Development: Create sandbox pages with each component, allowing front-end developers to directly consume data from Umbraco’s Content Delivery API. This eliminates the adaptation phase, reducing the back-and-forth typically seen between front-end and back-end developers.
• Focusing Back-End Development: Back-end developers can concentrate on custom APIs and integrations instead of adapting front-end code.

Conclusion

Using Umbraco Headless, we can streamline the development process by integrating document type creation into the requirements phase. This approach not only identifies potential issues early but also simplifies the development workflow, ultimately leading to a more efficient and effective project delivery. Let's short circuit the process and embrace the efficiencies offered by Umbraco Headless.