Decoupled Drupal in Practice

Book excerpt: Gain a clear understanding of the most important concepts in the decoupled CMS landscape. You will learn how to architect and implement decoupled Drupal architectures across the stack—from building the back end and designing APIs to integrating with front-end technologies. You'll also review presenting data through consumer applications in widely adopted technologies such as Angular, Ember, React, and Vue.js. Featuring a foreword by Drupal founder and project lead Dries Buytaert, the first part of this book chronicles the history of the CMS and the server–client divide, analyzes the risks and rewards of decoupled CMS architectures, and presents architectural patterns. From there, the book explores the core and contributed landscape for decoupled Drupal, authentication mechanisms, and the surrounding tooling ecosystem before delving into consumer implementations in a variety of technologies. Finally, a series of chapters on advanced topics feature the Drupal REST plugin system, schemas and generated documentation, and caching. Several projects point to a decoupled future for Drupal, including the Contenta CMS and work to modernize Drupal's JavaScript using React. Begin learning about these and other exciting developments with Decoupled Drupal today. What You’ll Learn Evaluate the risks and rewards of decoupled Drupal and classify its architectures Authenticate requests to Drupal using OAuth, JWT, and Basic Authentication Consume and manipulate Drupal content via API through HTTP requests Integrate with other consumer applications for native mobile and desktop as well as set-top boxes (Roku, Apple TV, Samsung TV) Add new resources to Drupal's REST API using the REST plugin system Generate API documentation that complies with the OpenAPI (Swagger) standard Who This Book Is For Those with some exposure to CMSes like WordPress and Drupal and those who wish to follow along with JavaScript application development will benefit. A familiarity with API-first or services-oriented architectures is helpful but not presumed.