CMS as a service with DecentCMS

No web site should be a silo. A CMS should be great at organizing, syndicating, and presenting your content, but it should also communicate with arbitrary applications outside the CMS. In particular, mobile applications should be able to use the data from the CMS. In DecentCMS, you can enable the content-api feature to expose all content items as JSON documents.

Content items are then available under two endpoints: src and shapes.

The first one, src, returns the source document for the content item. It is available under URLs of the form /api/src/[id]. For example, you can get the source document for this topic by navigating to /api/src/docs:decent-core-content/cms-as-a-service. It's possible to get to any item this way, such as the copyright widget on the bottom of this page: /api/src/widget:copyright.

Note that the formatting of the document will be a compact view, or a pretty printed, legible version depending on whether the site is running in release or debug mode.

The source view is useful, but doesn't always contain all the needed information. For example, here is the document that you'd get from /api/src/pages for a query on all page content items, if such a search page is available under the id /pages:

{
  "meta": {
    "type": "search-page"
  },
  "title": "Pages",
  "query": {
    "indexName": "pages",
    "idFilter": "^[^:]+$",
    "map": "item.meta.type !== 'page' ? null : {title: item.title, url: item.id}",
    "orderBy": "entry.title",
    "pageSize": 10
  },
  "id": "pages"
}

This is useful, if you're trying to edit the query, but not so much if you're trying to get its actual results. This is where the second endpoint becomes useful.

Navigating to the second endpoint for the same item, /api/shapes/pages, will give a document looking like this:

{
  "title": {
    "meta": {
      "type": "title",
      "name": "title"
    },
    "text": "Pages"
  },
  "query-results": {
    "indexName": "pages",
    "idFilter": "^[^:]+$",
    "map": "item.meta.type !== 'page' ? null : {title: item.title, url: item.id}",
    "orderBy": "entry.title",
    "pageSize": 10,
    "meta": {
      "type": "search-results",
      "name": "query-results",
      "alternates": [
        "search-results-query",
        "search-results-pages",
        "search-results-query-pages"
      ]
    },
    "results": [
      {
        "title": "Contact",
        "url": "/contact",
        "itemId": "/contact",
        "_order": "Contact"
      },
      {
        "title": "Your CMS Expert",
        "url": "/",
        "itemId": "/",
        "_order": "Your CMS Expert"
      }
    ]
  }
}

This is the result of letting all shape handlers run on the content item.

In this particular case, the title part handler, and the search part handler each built a shape. The search handler in particular ran the query and added its results to its own shape. Those results can be found under ['query-results'].results.