What is Decoupled Drupal?
Traditionally Drupal has been an excellent CMS to serve websites, but not an ideal solution for mobile, wearable or conversational interfaces that require RESTful API’s. Decoupled Drupal is a new paradigm that allows developers to implement any technology for rendering the front-end experience instead of the theming and presentation layers that come out-of-the-box. In this way, we can use the Drupal CMS platform that we know and love, to build omnichannel experiences like mobile application, chatbot experiences, etc.
Approaches for Decoupling
Fully Decoupled Drupal:
This involves a complete separation between Drupal’s front-end and back-end.
Progressively Decoupled Drupal:
Leverages Drupal’s rendering system along with JavaScript frameworks like React and Angular for a rich user experience. Learn more about these approaches here.
What does Decoupled Drupal mean for your website?
Omnichannel content
‘Create Once, Publish Anywhere’ - Decoupled Drupal architecture gives the freedom to content editors to publish content over multiple user experiences seamlessly. Decoupled Drupal uses structured content and is free from markup, making it exceedingly reusable than HTML. Content created once can be stored and reused in multiple ways and multiple interfaces enabling organizations to build digital experiences with a single back-end.
Enhanced front-end experience
Modern JS frameworks and libraries allow us to create amazing interactions for mobile experiences. With Decoupled Drupal, you can create the experiences you want to build with your preferred tools. Marketers are presented with unbound creativity, eliminating the limitations that previously existed. Javascript frameworks such as React, Angular, Node.js, VUE.js help developers quickly create complicated front-end applications and PWA’s.
Enhanced Performance
JavaScript frameworks come with out-of-the-box performance. With isolated development and templating, you can scale the back-end and front-end independently. Marketers are free to let their creativity reign, without running into limitations. Headless Drupal architecture allows Javascript frameworks such as ReactJS, Vue.js, and Angular to have complete control over the front-end user experience.
API-First approach
API-first approach places Drupal amidst multiple technical ecosystems simplifying the distribution of content. Developers can utilize APIs for data consumption rather than building an entire stack. The API-first approach enables Drupal to transfer content and data over different channels, mobile, IoT, conversational interfaces, digital kiosks, and more.
Eliminate technological dependency
Isolating Drupal from serving the front-end, allows you to change the front-end technologies, without having to rebuild or re-architect your Drupal back-end. Numerous websites revamp their designs regularly and a decoupled architecture makes it easier and cost-effective.
Integrate with Virtual Assistants
Being API-first, Drupal provides a lot of APIs out of the box. Decoupled Drupal serves as a content service, exposing content to virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant, and Siri seamlessly.
Decouple your Drupal site with
ReactJS
React is JavaScript’s most powerful and highly-used libraries for creating interactive user interfaces. React splits the code into components enabling developers to reuse code debug faster. Decoupling React with a powerful, API-first CMS with endless flexibility (Drupal), helps create amazing digital experiences.
Gatsby
Gatsby is a popular static site generator that can communicate with any back-end. Using Drupal as a headless CMS with Gatsby is a great way to get an enterprise-quality CMS for free, paired with a great modern development experience and all the benefits of JAMstack, like performance, scalability, and security.
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Decoupled Drupal FAQ
What is Headless CMS?
Headless CMS is a website development approach in which the CMS serves as the backend content repository. The frontend is built in different technologies and communicates with the CMS via an API.
When should I Decouple?
Decoupling is efficient when the front-end team requires complete freedom to structure and display the data or when multiple teams are working on the project.
Why is Drupal a preferred CMS for Decoupling?
Drupal is an API-first CMS, which if decoupled, prepares the website for future advancements, empowers the content for multiple devices, and enables faster website content delivery.
What are the types of Decoupled Drupal?
Drupal can be decoupled in two ways - Progressive Decoupled Drupal and Fully Decoupled Drupal.
What is Progressive Decoupling?
Progressive decoupling allows the front-end team to continue using Drupal’s rendering system while using a JavaScript framework to build an interactive user experience.
Which technology can be used with Decoupled Drupal?
Javascript, GatsbyJS, PHP, React, and PHP frameworks like Laravel and Symfony can be used for front-end development. JSON: API, GraphQL Module, and REST for back-end development.
Our experts help identify if decoupled Drupal is the right fit for your digital environment.
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