Build a Headless Site with dotCMS
What's Next
You've built a complete eadless site with dotCMS and Next.js — a home page, a dynamic blog listing, detail pages, and visual editing with UVE. That covers the core patterns you'll use in any dotCMS headless project.
Here's where to go from here.
Deploy your site#
Your site runs locally against a Docker dotCMS instance. To deploy it publicly you need two things: a publicly accessible dotCMS instance and a Next.js hosting platform.
dotCMS hosting options:
- dotCMS Cloud — https://www.dotcms.com/blog/what-is-a-cloud-cms
- Self-hosted — https://www.dotcms.com/self-hosted
Deploy the frontend to Vercel:
- Push your project to GitHub
- Go to vercel.com, import the repo
- Add your environment variables
- Click Deploy
Go deeper with dotCMS#
Content modeling
You worked with Blog, Banner, and BlogList content types. dotCMS lets you define your own content types with any fields you need — rich text, relationships, categories, images, and more.
[Content types docs → https://dev.dotcms.com/docs/content-types
GraphQL API The detail page introduced GraphQL for fetching relationship fields. The full dotCMS GraphQL API gives you fine-grained control over exactly what data you fetch — useful for performance-sensitive pages. [GraphQL API docs → https://dev.dotcms.com/docs/graphql
Go deeper with the stack#
Custom block editor renderers
DotCMSBlockEditorRenderer handles standard content out of the box. For custom node types — embeds, custom layouts, interactive blocks — you can register your own renderers.
[Block editor renderer docs → https://dev.dotcms.com/docs/block-editor#BlockTypes
Self-hosting dotCMS If you want to run dotCMS on your own infrastructure instead of using dotCMS Cloud, see the Self-Hosting Hub for setup guides, Docker configuration, and production best practices. [Self-Hosting Hub → LINK TO BE FILLED IN]
Get help#
- dotCMS docs — dev.dotcms.com
- dotCMS community — community.dotcms.com
- GitHub — github.com/dotCMS
You've completed the course!
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