We think of Craft a faceless CMS, in a Jaqen H’ghar sort of way. It leaves the front-end of your website completely up to the implementation, so no two Craft sites look the same.
In addition to being faceless, Craft is also a very capable headless CMS. The term “headless CMS” refers to a model where the CMS is only given two jobs: to manage the content and distribute it via an API. The job of presenting the content is handled by a separate application (the “head”), whether that’s a mobile app or a single-page app (SPA).
If you want to use Craft to drive the content in a separate application – possibly in addition to driving a regular website – you’ll probably want to check out our Element API plugin. Element API gives you the ability to define some HTTP endpoints that return content in JSON. You get to define which elements each endpoint should query, and how the response data should look.
It’s never been easier to get up and running with Craft + Element API, because just today, Mijingo released a new free lesson on it: Creating an Element API in Craft. Check it out!