David Eglin is a consultant and technology leader with 20+ years’ experience in engineering and content strategy. He focuses on headless CMS and composable architecture, with a particular interest in content modelling and platform decisions. He has worked with organisations including Cancer Research UK, and is the founder of The Headless Company.
[ENG] A missing layer in content modelling
When organisations move to a headless CMS, one of the first challenges is understanding how their content should be structured. Ideally, that thinking happens before a platform is selected. In practice, it’s often incomplete, rushed, or shaped by the tools under consideration. Teams tend to fall into one of two approaches: Either they stay in the abstract, using diagrams and documentation that are useful for discussion but difficult to translate into working models, or they start modelling directly in a CMS early, which gives them something concrete but begins to shape decisions before those decisions have actually been made. Both approaches are valid, but both introduce challenges. Content models become tied to tools too early, or they remain too theoretical to be properly tested. When a platform is eventually selected, much of the work is repeated, translating ideas into structures that fit the chosen system. This talk explores that gap. Drawing on real-world project experience, it looks at why content models are difficult to define, communicate, and move between systems. It introduces the idea of a “missing layer” between abstract design and CMS implementation, and what that layer needs to provide in order to be useful in practice. As part of this, the session will also introduce CMMF (Content Modelling Master Framework), an open approach to describing content models independently of any specific CMS, and use it as a way to explore what a more portable, platform-agnostic model might look like in practice.