I've been using Airtable[0] as a headless CMS to good effect. I'm enjoying the flexibility of creating and modifying 'tables' using a spreadsheet interface, with the nice bonus of using relationships between tables as well.

The free tier should be more than good enough for simple sites. There's no real concern with lock-in either, since you can just export to JSON/CSV and move on.

You can do forms too. If you're using something like Netlify[1], you can write a function that receives a form request and adds that as a record to Airtable.

And if you're using Jekyll for your site, you just need a few lines of Ruby[1] that lets you pull in content from Airtable.

In the longer run, I'd prefer to use something that uses a similar spreadsheet-like interface, but something that's open source so I can self-host it. But for now, this works.

Note: No affiliation with Airtable or Netlify.

[0] https://airtable.com/

[1] https://www.netlify.com/

[2] https://community.airtable.com/t/how-to-easily-use-airtable-...

If PHP, then ProcessWire [1].

ProcessWire is a Content Management System, not a CMS which includes a design or layout system like Wordpress.

So as a developer you are free to develop the front-end the way you like. Which is easy with the provided API.

I use it for API's, small and huge websites. Love it.

[1] https://processwire.com/

Taking the question literally, I've been interested in building web apps on WordPress for a couple years now. I've spoken about it a couple times at WordCamps. https://wordpress.tv/2017/06/05/corey-maass-rapid-web-app-de... It's an amazing platform for rapid web app development, as it takes care of common patterns out of the box like user management, routing and more. Do you have specific goals or questions?

I wonder how many of you actually maintain and support enterprise CMS systems, like Sitecore or Sitefinity? Looks like the majority of the people here are homegrown hackers/devs, that either don't work in a company having a heavy CMS, or tend to prefer building everything themselves. Well, everything except the content management itself.

The tendency is to have very light front-end, while consuming the content from some services. At the same time, content clouds and headless CMSes haven't really taken off yet.

This depends on the use-case. We have recently moved away (slightly) from using MODX as our main CMS, because the clients we have picked up need less content management but more bespoke functionality and better performance so have used things like Laravel +Voyager.

They are all managing content, but in different ways

Depends what you mean by web apps or how you're going to code them.

If you're using something like React or Vue, then I'm guessing any CMS used as a headless API would probably be ideal, since the system would only be used for creating content/the admin area.

For putting web apps in CMS?

Why risk your app on dependency of some CMS?

If you are looking for market in extending some popular CMS, then you probably should go for some more popular CMS, which currently is WordPress. Unless you are in an industry which has some nice CMS usage like Drupal or Joomla.

What do you need from a CMS?

Wordpress?