Templateless, data-only publishing

You can use the templateless, data-only publishing framework to publish content "as is" to Content Delivery, without rendering the content with a template. This leaves the data modeling and rendering to your web development team.

Benefits

The templateless, data-only publishing framework has multiple advantages over template-based publishing:

Time to market
After content design has finished, there is no need to wait for templates to be developed. There is also no need for a content freeze.
Publishing performance
Because content does not need to be rendered beforehand, publishing is faster.
CaaS (Content as a Service)
The framework offers native support for a CaaS model, because content is easily accessible through the PCA.
Hyper-headlessness
You can extend and configure the GraphQL Service, and you directly use native Tridion Data.
Semantic content models
Content is published in a generic content model on the Content Delivery. Custom modeling through Semantic Content Models makes it possible to delivery the right type of data in the right format directly to a PCA client.
Lean end-to-end publishing
The new publishing pipeline means the following:
  • Less coding frameworks involved
  • Better deployability
  • Better scalability
Decoupled release cycles of content and web application
Because web application developers don't need to know the inner workings of Content Manager, they can work independently from the content creators.
Publishing once
When a piece of content changes, it needs to be published only once. No more publishing the same content rendered in multiple Component Presentations.
Content is searchable out of the box
Because the published content is also indexed, it is immediately searchable through GraphQL queries.

Content Manager-side functionality

In support of templateless, data-only publishing, Content Manager provides the following functionality:

Publishing content in JSON format

Content Manager publishes Components, Pages, Structure Group models and all supporting schemas to a standard JSON format. As a result of being published as JSON, the content is available through the GraphQL endpoint of the Public Content API.

Schema options and properties for data publishing and indexing

A number of schema types have properties that are specifically for templateless, data-only publishing, which enable you to control whether content based on a schema will be published and indexed for search and GraphQL queries. The properties are configurable in Content Manager Explorer for the following types of schemas: Schemas (Component), Multimedia Schemas, Metadata Schemas, Region Schemas and Embeddable Schemas.

Link resolving
You can set a system-wide recursion depth for resolving linked content items during the publishing of Pages, Components, Multimedia Components and Structure Groups. The Link Resolver Recursion Depth option is available from the main menu under Administration > Link Resolver Settings.
This setting determines how deeply the Publisher service looks during publishing to resolve the content of linked Components, and it applies equally to explicit requests to publish items and to implicit requests that result from the resolving logic (such as from publishing a Publication or Bundle.
Data Publishing Page Template
Content Manager provides the Data Publishing Page Template as a default Building Block, created automatically with every new Publication that gets created. Unlike the default Page Template, this one contains no Template Building Blocks (TBBs) because templateless, data-only publishing does not require TBB functionality.

Content Delivery-side functionality

Semantic Content Models
When a user publishes content from Content Manager, that content is always published in JSON format, using the templateless, data-only publishing mechanism. By default, a web developer can access all of the published content through a standard data model, but you can also create a custom Semantic Content Model to retrieve a subset of the published content—just what you need for a specific webpage or other publishing output.