Using Craft to render frontend pages in addition to using it headless

Question

I’m looking to create a craft site for some digital storytelling pieces. The pages will be curated by various people within my team. But I also like the idea of using the CMS to push separate content within the cms, to things other than the website. This would give us a lot of flexibility. Can you use Craft to render the front pages using twig as normal, and additionally run it in headless mode? Or if i want the benefit of using it as a headless CMS would I instead have to render the frontend site using a static site generator, like Gatsbyjs? What are my options if I want to use it both ways?

Thanks,

Richard

Answer 1

Absolutely! Craft works really well like this. You can use twig to render your website, then either element api or graph QL (built in to craft 3.3) to open up your data to other applications.

I run several sites like this where I’ve opened up various parts of the content for external use, e.g. the news feed for use in an app.