Two systems, one truth
A headless CMS means every content change crosses a network boundary and every type is hand-written on the far side.
Products
The CMS is part of the app, not a service you integrate.
Publishing tools usually arrive as a second system with its own database, its own login, and an API in the middle. Stacks ships posts, authors, pages, categories, tags, and comments as models in the same application, so an editor screen and a public page are two views over one row.
What this always turns out to involve.
The work that arrives whether you planned for it or not.
Editors are users too
Drafts, scheduling, roles, and previews need auth that the public site already has.
Feeds and SEO are silent
A missing sitemap or a broken canonical tag never throws; it just costs traffic for months.
Media adds up
Uploads, variants, and CDN URLs need somewhere to live that works the same locally and in production.
What is already in the box.
All of it in the same install, typed against the rest of your application.
Content models
Posts, pages, authors, categories, tags, and comments ship as first-party models, extendable in app/Models/.
Editing surface
Dashboard content views cover drafts, scheduling, and moderation without a bespoke admin build.
Markdown and STX
Long-form content lives in content/ as markdown or renders through STX views, with the same layouts as the rest of the site.
Feeds, sitemaps, SEO
RSS, sitemap, canonical, and Open Graph output come from the same content, generated rather than typed.
Media pipeline
@stacksjs/storage handles uploads locally and on S3 behind one API, with image variants generated on demand.
Full-text search
The useSearch trait indexes posts as they publish, so site search is a trait flag rather than a service.
The layers it leans on.
Every one of these ships in the same install. Follow one to see what it covers.
From the command line.
Buddy scaffolds, runs, and ships this the same way it does the rest of the app.
buddy make:model Post
buddy migrate
buddy dev
Next door to this.
Projects of this shape usually grow into one of these.