What if you could say to a front-end developer:
“Build it the best way you know how and with the best tools available. Don’t worry that we’re using Drupal”
You can see the presentation video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1rc5CEro6U or go to the last slide.
2. Alex De Winne
• 15 years in the industry
• Drupal since 4.7
• Founder of Therefore
• Hacker, visionary, tech enthusiast
& musician
3. “Build it the best way you
know how and with the best
tools available. Don’t worry
that we’re using Drupal”
What if you could say to a front-end developer:
4. Use Drupal more like it’s a Content
Management System and less like it’s a
Web Publishing Tool
5. WPT vs CMS
The goal of a Web Publishing Tool is to capture
content with the primary purpose of publishing web
pages.
The goal of any CMS should be to allow storage of
structured content and dissemination of content to any
platform, in any presentation, at any time.
6. Decoupling Drupal
It means making no assumptions as to where your
content will end up.
What’s required is complete separation between
the Backend Content Model and the Front-End.
It’s about seeing Drupal as a component of a
Distributed CMS rather than a Monolith Web
Publishing Tool.
8. The Monolithic Stack
In the 90’s, virtually all
applications were written using
well defined stacks of services
and deployed on a single
monolithic, proprietary server.
1995
Thick, client-server app
on thick client
Well-defined stack:
• O/S
• Runtime
• Middleware
Monolithic
Physical
Infrastructure
Does this look familiar?
10. Karen says we need…
Reusable content
Structured content
Meaningful meta data
A presentation independent CMS
11. COPE
• NRP has been operating a decoupled CMS for over
10 years.
• NPR credits its API with increasing page views by
80%, largely because they’re able to get their
content onto a variety of mobile devices without
custom programming.
Create Once, Publish Everywhere
20. What We Learned
&
What You Can Expect to
Change When Working in a
Decoupled CMS Architecture
21. You’ll start to think differently
about your CMS
• You’ll start to see your CMS as a
tool content writers and content
architects like to hang out.
• Front-end developers will see it an
API to a content repository. No
longer a system that dictates which
technologies they can or can’t use.
22. Workflow Optimization
• Prototypes can turn into the real
thing with no extra work. Just add
API™
• Decreased dependancies allow
teams to operate more efficiently.
• Reduces the risk that a change
made within one element will
create unanticipated changes
within other elements.
23. Upgradeability / Interchangeability
• Swap out front-ends, keep the back-
end as is
• Add front-end publishing end points,
keep the back-end as is
• Back-end upgrades, keep the front-
end as is.
24. Increased Reliability and
Security
• A full stack CMS falls apart if any
component stops working properly. It’s
pretty hard to break a static website.
• Drupal can be safely hidden behind a
corporate firewall. Only the API is
required to be exposed, and optionally
restricted to only interfacing with the
static server.
25. Increased Scope Flexibility
In many cases it’s not a requirement to
have 100% CMS coverage.
If we’re working towards a fixed cost
project with a flexible scope, one of the
elements that could get de-prioritized is
CMS coverage.
It can always be added later.
26. Speed and Scalability
• Caching of the static files in memory
• Serving files from a CDN or a load
balanced configuration
• Utilizing a distributed file system to
avoid slow disk performance
bottlenecks
It doesn’t get much faster than a static site. But, when you
need even more speed here are some options:
30. Challenges
Authentication and roles are
potentially more complicated to
setup.
Reusable logic patterns become
non-reusable when moved to the
front-end.
Challenges arise with X-domain
requests.
34. API Based Front-End Publishing
Redis
Disqus
Prediction
Twillio
Hapi
Router
DocPad
Static
Site
iPhone App
Print
Workflow
PaaS
S3CDN
Translate
HTTP Router
HTML Site
Native App
PDF Document
38. Is this all a bunch of blue sky
dreaming?
Maybe, but check out what prismic is up to…
39. It features a Writing Room for content writers to author,
manage and store content, and a Content Query API for
developers to integrate managed content into any website or
app.
REST, JSON or HTML,
effective API browser,
easy to use
Comfortable content creation
experience. Addressing
content writers’ real-life
problems.
Content is API-based.
Inject it easily into new
platforms and sites.