There are many features that I like in Crafter CMS. Some of the noteworthy ones are:- 1) Content authors and developers can work on the same version of "truth" and this enables rapid feedback from authors to devs. 2) Git based versioning allows easy branching out and merging back for new features. 3) Self contained installer bundles (tomcat, elasticsearch, webapp jars etc) provide an easy way to create prototypes. 4) REST API to configure and monitor the engine and studio services 5) JVM based architecture means backend features can be developed and debugged from IDEA (or any other capable Java IDE)
There are a couple of things that I believe could be improved for an even better user experience. They are:- 1) There are far too many externalised configuration properties and they are scattered over a large number xml files. It would be great if some of these can be internalised (some sensible defaults with ability to override if necessary) and the external ones made more intuitive. 2) The documentation, though extensive, is not very user friendly. It has a "reference manual" kind-of layout which helps someone who knows crafter very well but needs more details on how to do something (for example:- they know that an issue is in the studio and also know which api to call, but needs more information regarding the payload, or request headers etc). For someone completely new to Crafter, the documentation navigation is not very conducive to an "exploratory" style of learning the product.
The biggest benefit is the ease with which new API endpoints can be added to the site for search, categorisation, filtering etc. It also takes care of indexing and caching of content so that queries are executed quickly. It has given us a rapid yet fully managed way of publishing content out into the world. The audit log is also super helpful in finding the responsible authors so that any issues with content can be easily rectified.
Crafter CMS has well architected modular design, which gives us great flexibility during our adoption. We chose headless approach to use contents as service. The flexible architecture make the integration with Crafter CMS easy to do. The preview feature give content authors the ability to view contents as how they will render in the final web site no matter what type of rendering engine you choose. Good product is only half of the story. We are particularly impressed by the superb support we get. You truly feel you can count on them as your partner. They listen to your need and work with you every step on the way to find the optimal solution.
not easy to integrate 3rd party UI controlls in the authoring tool.
Web Content Management so that web site can be updated without release.