As I explore headless CMS platforms, I plan to keep an eye on the content modeling experience. After all, the purpose of a CMS is to manage content. Having a rich and easy experience modeling the content is important for a number of reasons:

• Its the foundation of a content-heavy website, so getting the model done right and in a scalable way is important.
• The modeling experience should be easy and frictionless. If its hard to do it, your foundation crumbles nd you are more prone to errors or less likely to make adjustments to your model.
• Early on in a project, I find is very (very) useful to art modeling content ASAP. I prefer to put it in front of end users of the CMS (typically my client!). Why? Because the CMS is for them. They need to see and feel what it will be like to manage this content, and its relationships to other content.

So why do I think Sitecore is the gold standard for a content modeling experience? Well, maybe I'm being super biased and dramatic, but what I really mean is its my reference for for another other CMS. Sitecore offers a CMS-defined authoring experience via the CMS UI, as opposed to developer-first / code-first content modeling that requires code (C#, JSON, etc.). I find this useful for a few reasons:

• Easier to get up and running creating models in real-time with a end user / content author - you just need a running Sitecore instance (local or remote), you don't need a codebase yet
• Content authors can more easily see the model in the visual editor and understand it (vs. trying to undersand what that code if you are writing)

Stay tuned as we dig in under the hood to see what various headless CMS platforms offer in this area.