[jehb]

Drupal is a great CMS framework. With Drupal and a capable development team, you can use Drupal to build an awesome CMS, and if you want to, also an awesome website on top of the CMS.

Drupal is not a great piece of software to try to use out of the box as both a CMS and a website front-end. Drupal doesn't have the same kind of ecosystem as WordPress. Many of the best themes and modules are really there to assist your development of your own features, as opposed to being plug-and-play solutions.

[solardev]

What, in your opinion, would be an advantage of Drupal over a headless CMS?

[jehb]

I'm not sure I understand the question. Drupal is a headless CMS if you want it to be. Do you mean what would be a reason for using Drupal's front-end over developing your own? I came to Drupal from managing community sites with lots of different user roles that each need complex permission sets, and I'd say it really excels over other CMS front-ends for that. Drupal.org is itself an example of this kind of site: thousands of different users (including untrusted users) logging in and creating and editing and moderating content in real-time. Sure, you could rebuild all of this functionality with the exposed APIs, but that'd be a ton of work.

[rumblestrut]

You can easily use Drupal to create the backend for a headless CMS. It's about as simple as turning on the JSON API module that comes out of the box, and then start creating content types.

But then you're having to maintain the CMS, which isn't as appealing as using something like Contentful. It really depends on your use case (like all technologies, of course).

[thinnerlizzy]

Drupal basically is a headless CMS plus a CMS front end if you expose the web service module.

[whalesalad]

This reads like something out of chat gpt