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In the early 2020s, passionate web developers from Nimble Initiatives saw an opportunity to revolutionize the content management landscape. Frustrated by the bloat, complexity, and performance issues plaguing many existing CMS solutions, they set out to create something new—a CMS that would embody their clean, efficient, and user-centric design philosophy.
Thus, Strife was born. The founders envisioned Strife as a CMS and a platform that would empower businesses to craft exceptional digital experiences for their customers. At the heart of their approach was a deep commitment to performance, simplicity, and flexibility.
Strife’s Approach to Content Management
Nimble Initiatives is working on reinventing content management. They are developing a headless CMS with an excellent live preview called Strife, which aims to combine the benefits of a headless CMS while still meeting editors’ expectations of an easy-to-use everyday tool. Strife is designed to provide businesses with a seamless and high-performance content management experience.
A headless CMS is a content management system that separates the content management (the “body”) from the content delivery (the “head”). This allows for more flexibility and easier integration with other systems. Unlike a traditional CMS, which combines conte
Strife is focused on web standards and is an offline-first application. RavenDB’s data subscriptions API has been crucial in enabling this high-performance approach.
To validate Strife’s performance, the team benchmarked against a widely adopted CMS recognized by Gartner. The evaluation, carried out with caching disabled and under slow 3G network conditions, revealed impressive results.
- 93% fewer requests: Strife significantly reduces the number of requests.
- 68% less resource usage: Strife optimizes the consumption of resources.
- 3.5 times faster loading: Strife enhances overall loading speed.
The Strife’s team also recognizes the importance of website performance, especially on mobile devices. They have investigated the factors contributing to poor mobile performance and believe that site speed is a crucial aspect that businesses should prioritize before investing in marketing. The company emphasizes that improving site speed, particularly in critical areas like product listings and checkout, can significantly increase revenue.
“We are a headless CMS that allows developers to use our product and choose their code base. It doesn’t force them to use any specific technology. It’s a CMS that allows users to handle their product content and has product information management (PIM) capabilities.”
Anders Granberg, Co-founder at Strife
The team recognized that traditional CMSs often burden developers and content editors with extraneous features, bloated codebases, and unintuitive interfaces. In contrast, Strife is laser-focused on the core functionality that businesses need most—content management, product information, and digital asset handling—and delivers it in a delightfully easy-to-use package.
How RavenDB Fits In
The Strife team turned to RavenDB as the database backbone to achieve this. RavenDB’s document-oriented model aligned perfectly with Strife’s flexible, componentized approach to content. RavenDB’s querying capabilities, real-time change tracking, and support for offline-first architectures were crucial in delivering the snappy, responsive user experience central to Strife’s vision.
One early Strife customer was a growing e-commerce company that was struggling with their existing CMS. They found the interface clunky, the content editing process cumbersome, and the performance of their website lagging. With Strife, they quickly set up a sleek, modern storefront that integrated seamlessly with their product catalog.
The company’s content editors marveled at Strife’s intuitive interface and real-time previewing capabilities, which allowed them to craft engaging pages without getting bogged down in technical details. Meanwhile, the development team appreciated Strife’s flexibility – they were able to build custom functionality on top of Strife’s API-first architecture, tailoring the experience to their unique business needs.
“It’s not just about building a CMS. It’s about empowering our customers to craft exceptional digital experiences that delight their users. And RavenDB has been an invaluable partner in helping us realize that vision.”
Anders Granberg, Co-founder at Strife
Key Benefits of Strife’s RavenDB Integration
1. Flexible Content Modeling
Strife’s document-oriented architecture, powered by RavenDB, allows for a highly flexible and componentized approach to content management. This enables businesses to craft unique digital experiences without being constrained by rigid content structures. Strife stores its content templates as JSON documents in RavenDB, allowing for dynamic creation and modification of content types.
2. Blazing-Fast Performance
By leveraging RavenDB’s real-time change tracking and offline-first capabilities, Strife delivers a snappy, responsive user experience for content editors and website visitors. This helps businesses engage their audience and boost productivity. Strife uses RavenDB’s subscription features to enable instant updates in the browser and the Changes API to efficiently synchronize data between multiple databases.
3. Seamless Integration and Extensibility
Strife’s API-first design and RavenDB’s robust querying features make it easy for developers to integrate Strife with other systems and build custom functionality tailored to their specific needs. Strife utilizes RavenDB’s dynamic URL generation capabilities to automatically update content URLs as the hierarchy changes.
4. Energy-Efficient and Lightweight
Strife’s focus on performance optimization and minimalism, complemented by RavenDB’s efficient data handling, ensures that the CMS is both environmentally friendly and easy on resources, leading to improved website speed and reduced carbon footprint. Strife optimizes images and only serves the necessary content, while RavenDB’s document-oriented approach helps keep the codebase and data lightweight.
Empowering Businesses to Craft Exceptional Digital Experiences
Strife CMS has customers live on the product, with more projects coming in Q4 2024. The public release is planned for around Q4 2024, approximately six months after signing up on the waiting list.
Today, Strife continues to grow, with a passionate community of developers and content creators pushing the boundaries of what a CMS can be. The powerful, flexible, and performant foundation that RavenDB provides is at the heart of it all. As more businesses embrace Strife’s innovative approach, the future of digital experiences is being redefined, one exceptional website at a time.
