Content written for a blog post can be often reused for social media, photos shot for an online ad can serve well for website images and so on. What’s the most convenient way to share that content across your teams? Providing content as APIs.

*What is an API?*
An API, or Application Programming Interface, is how developers interact with a specific system. They speak to systems through APIs; these APIs allow them to (primarily) read data from and write data to systems.

*How does an API help to reuse content?*
Storing your content in a Content Management System and accessing it through an API helps put structure and organize your assets. Regardless of the kind of data you’re storing in the system - text, images, files - organizing it upfront is key to reusing it later. You could argue that storing it in folders on your hard drive is good enough, but not if you intend to utilize it in different channels - for example, web apps, mobile apps, websites and so on. Publishing data in a form that is easily accessible by developers allows you to reap the benefits of modern technologies and the multitude of channels that they offer.

To properly organize your digital content, you should look at Content Management Systems. However, using a traditional CMS can often lead to mixing your real content (for example news announcements) with the description of how they should appear in the user's web browsers. That’s a big problem because it makes it impossible to reuse that content in other channels.

*What is a headless CMS?*
A headless CMS is a system that allows developers to store content inside it - it acts as a content repository and has virtually no user interface. The main focus of a headless CMS is raw data and separating content from its presentation in a particular medium.

A headless system provides means to define different content models. For example, you will be able to define different models for storing:

- Product data,

- Images

- Blog posts,

- Information about stores offering your product.

*What are content as a service (CaaS) platforms?*
A content as a service platform is a system that can publish structured content in an organized way, separated from the front-end, so it’s easily reusable using different channels and technologies. It’s often offered as a fully managed online platform. Some of the platforms worth exploring include:

- Contentful

- Flotiq

- Storyblok.

What are the important features of a content as a service platform?
From the content editors perspective - the most important features are:

- An easy to use text editor

- Content versioning

- Workflow support

- Image handling

As a developer - you would probably expect:

- Easy to use APIs,

- Ability to define and extend content models,

- Ability to define scoped API keys to access specific parts of the system,

- Powerful full-text search,

- Batch import / export of data,

- High performance, low latency content API,

- Fully-managed service.

*Why is Flotiq among the best content platforms?*

Flotiq’s approach to building content models and content delivery make our system really stand out. Here are a couple of key differentiators.

Once a content model is defined - developers are provided with a set of customised tools that are tailored to the specific needs of their project.

Our customised, automatically generated APIs decrease the amount of work required to integrate systems with Flotiq’s content API.

It’s extremely easy to connect systems that consume content stored in Flotiq in a no-code or low-code fashion.

Flotiq’s powerful full-text search engine allows developers to easily implement search engines and find relevant content.

Content editors can work comfortably with an easy-to-use interface.

Complex workflows can be defined to support different publishing scenarios.