Directus, an Open Source Headless CMS written in PHP

Directus is a new player in the Content as a Service field. With many options for available for decoupling with a headless CMS, there is an abundance of options out there for people and organizations looking for a robust Content Platform. Is Directus worth a look and what advantage does it hold over more established players?

Directus differs from pure CaaS players like Contentful and Prismic in the sense that developers have more insight into how the system is built. Business users may opt to choose the hosted options for simplicity, scalability and zero maintenance with a flat monthly fee, but for those with technical skills may prefer to use the Open Source Headless CMS as an alternative to traditional tools like Drupal and WordPress.

With PHP and MySQL powering the majority of traditional Open Source CMS tools, the source code of Directus looks immediately familiar to millions of web developers familiar with PHP development. This is an advantage in a world where spending time on learning new tools that might fall to irrelevance quickly is a risky investment for developers.

Directus comes out as a fully featured headless CMS with sophisticated asset management, messaging and commenting capabilities, versioning as well as as internal extension points. All topped with a public API using REST. While GraphQL is not currently not supported as a protocol, it's likely that that can be added soon, building on the GraphQL groundwork already in place for PHP.