A Spring blog engine like no other

Meet the Spring blog engine that integrates with your website using a straightforward API. Smooth, simple, and tasty content integration — that’s Butter.

Intuitive admin interface

So easy to use. So easy to customize. You’re going to love the blog you build with ButterCMS.

Handy integration with Spring

Our Spring blog engine has a simple content API and drop-in Java SDK that makes the magic happen in minutes, not hours.

A truly zero-maintenance solution

With ButterCMS, you’ll never worry about security upgrades, hosting, or performance again.

You've got better things to do than build another blog

Drop our Spring blog engine into your app, and get back to more interesting problems.

ButterCMS is an API-based blog engine that integrates seamlessly with new and existing Spring apps. It's great for SEO, and provides a clean and modern user interface that your marketing team will love. You can deploy ButterCMS in minutes using our Java API client. 

That leaves plenty of time for you and your marketing team to do what you do best: create killer apps with killer content. 

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See how Butter’s API enables you to launch a flexible blog with amazing SEO using your existing tech stack.
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Best blog engine on the market

headshot of Hampton Catlin
After shopping the market, it was clear that ButterCMS was the perfect choice. It allows our developers to build powerful components and makes it easy for our marketing team to drive a better customer experience. Hampton Catlin Creator of Sass and Haml

Deploy our Java Spring starter in 30 seconds

A screenshot of a starter project

Or follow the below commands to clone a copy of the repo from github, install dependencies, set your free Butter token, and run your local server on localhost:8080/.

git clone https://github.com/ButterCMS/java-starter-buttercms.git
cd java-starter-buttercms
echo 'JAVA_BUTTER_CMS_API_KEY=your_free_butter_api_token_here' >> .env
mvn install
mvn spring-boot:run

Built to make content marketing easy

ButterCMS is the best Spring blog engine for a simple reason: Spring developers can build solutions that marketing people love. Our API allows your content gurus to quickly spin up high-converting blog templates, sidebars, related content features, and more, all using simple drag-and-drop functionality.

  • Use main domain (improves SEO)
  • Friendly admin interface
  • Upload images, video, and other media
  • Edit URL slugs and meta tags
  • Tags and categories
  • Author profiles
  • RSS/Atom feeds
  • Search
  • Webhooks
  • And more...
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The simplest Spring blog engine you'll find

Our simple setup saves you time and money. Take us for a spin to see for yourself!

headshot of LUKE GARDNER,
It's the epitome of plug-and-play simplicity for content creators. It does exactly what I need it to. LUKE GARDNER, CONTENT SPECIALIST, PRINTAVO
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Fast integration with any Spring app

Our mission was to make it easy to integrate Butter with your existing Spring app in minutes. It’s so simple! To demonstrate, here’s a mini tutorial to give you a feel for the process of adding Butter to your Spring app.

Of course, you can also use our Pages and Collections to do advanced content modeling. For a full integration guide, check out our Official Guide for the ButterCMS Java API client.

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See how easily you can integrate the ButterCMS Pages API with your Spring app.

Seamless Spring components

Empower your marketing team to create a customized blog engine that aligns perfectly with your Spring components. 

Components are the essential building blocks of any Spring app, and ButterCMS handles them with ease. 

Our drag and drop interface makes it simple to structure your content to match existing Spring components and to create new reusable components whenever you need them.

The best Spring blog engine for SEO

ButterCMS gives you absolute control over on-page SEO ranking factors. Key SEO variables are built into our default post template, giving your marketing team direct access to configure all of these settings, and more.

  • Page title
  • Post tags and categories
  • META description
  • URL slug
  • Featured image / Open Graph image
  • Image ALT tags
  • Link anchor text
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ButterCMS saves you development time

Most customers get our Spring blog engine up and running in less than an hour. Try it yourself!

headshot of DILLON BURNS,
Simple as can be, with powerful features and great customer support. DILLON BURNS, FRONT END DEVELOPER, KEYME
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How to integrate ButterCMS into your Spring application

Integrating the Butter blog engine into your Spring app is dead simple. Here's a mini tutorial to get a feel for setting up your blog home and blog post pages. 

For a full integration guide, check out our Official Java Guide. 

To display posts we create a simple /blog route in our app and fetch blog posts from the Butter API. See our API reference for additional options such as filtering by category or author. The response also includes some metadata we'll use for pagination.

com.yourorganization.app.controllers


@Controller
public class BlogController {
  private IButterCMSClient butterCMSClient;

  public BlogController(IButterCMSClient butterCMSClient) {
    this.butterCMSClient = butterCMSClient;
  }

  @RequestMapping("/blogs")
  public String getBlogs(Model model, @RequestParam(value = "category", required = false) String category, @RequestParam(value = "tag", required = false) String tag) {
    PostsResponse posts = butterCMSClient.getPosts(new HashMap<String, String>() {{
      put("category_slug", category);
      put("tag_slug", tag);
    }});
    if (posts.getData() == null || posts.getData().isEmpty()) {
      return "404";
    }
    model.addAttribute("blogs", posts.getData().stream()
        .map(value ->
            new HashMap<String, String>() {{
              put("slug", value.getSlug());
              put("title", value.getTitle());
            }}
        ).collect(Collectors.toList()));
    model.addAttribute("category", category);
    model.addAttribute("tag", tag);
    return "blog/blogs";
  }

Next we'll create a simple view at src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/jsp/blog/blogs.jsp that displays our posts and pagination links:

<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>Hello! This is Java ButterCMS example!</title>
</head>
<body>
<h2 class="hello-title">Hello! This is Java ButterCMS example!</h2>
<h3>Here is a list of Posts</h3>
<c:if test="${not empty tag}">
    <h4>Tag: ${tag}</h4>
</c:if>
<c:if test="${not empty category}">
    <h4>Category: ${category}</h4>
</c:if>
<ul>
    <c:forEach items="${blogs}" var="blog">
        <li><a href="/blog/${blog["slug"]}">${blog["title"]}</a></li>
    </c:forEach>
</ul>
</body>
</html>

We'll also create an additional route and controller method for displaying individual posts:

@RequestMapping("/blog/{slug}")
  public String getBlog(Model model, @PathVariable("slug") String slug) {
    PostResponse post = butterCMSClient.getPost(slug);
    model.addAttribute("blog", post.getData());
    return "blog/blog";
  }

The view for displaying a full post includes information such as author, publish date, and categories. See a full list of available post properties in our API reference. We use the Page object for setting the HTML title and meta description in the tag of the page.

src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/jsp/blog/blogs.jsp

<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <title>${blog.seoTitle}</title>
  <meta property="og:title" content="${blog.seoTitle}"/>
  <meta property="og:image" content="${blog.featuredImage}"/>
  <meta property="og:description" content="${blog.metaDescription}"/>
</head>
<body>
<h1>${blog.title}</h1>
<ul>
    <li>Author: ${blog.author.firstName} ${blog.author.lastName}</li>
    <li>Published: ${blog.published}</li>
    <li>Tags:
        <c:forEach items="${post.tags}" var="tag">
            ${tag.name}
        </c:forEach>
    </li>
</ul>
<img src="${blog.featuredImage}"/>
<div>
    <c:out value="${blog.body}" escapeXml="false"/>
</div>
</body>
</html>

That's it! The blog posts created in your Butter dashboard will immediately show up in your app.

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About ButterCMS

What kind of database can I use?

No database required! We're a SaaS CMS or CaaS. You simply call our Content API from your app. We host and maintain all of the CMS infrastructure.

Do you host my templates?

Unlike CMSs you might be used to, we don't control or host any of your templates. The design of your app (HTML + CSS) lives in your application along side the rest of your app. Your application calls our Content API and we return your content in JSON format. You can then render this content in any way you'd like.

Can I import my content?

Yep. To import existing content from another platform, simply send us an email.

How do you compare to WordPress?

In short, we offer all the same easy-to-use editing capabilities of WordPress but are significantly easier for developers to setup and maintain. This means you spend less time working on your CMS and more time focusing on things important to your business.

Can I self host Butter?

No, we're a SaaS CMS or CaaS. You simply call our Content API from your app. We host and maintain all of the CMS infrastructure.

For more information on how we compare to a traditional CMS, check out Headless CMS vs Traditional CMS on the Butter blog. Do you have more questions? Read our FAQ below, or feel free to chat with us directly.

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See for yourself what makes Butter the best Spring blog engine out there. Click the button below to sign up for your free 30-day trial.

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