Decoupled Drupal out-of-box with Contenta CMS distribution

When it comes to creating websites quickly and easily, there’s hardly anything that compares to Drupal distributions. These are ready Drupal builds with core, theme, set of modules, libraries, and configuration ready for a particular industry, website type, or use. One of the hottest uses today is decoupled Drupal architecture. Of course, Drupal has got distributions for it that give you decoupled Drupal out-of-box. They include Reservoir, Headless Lightning, and the hero of our article — Contenta CMS.

Decoupled Drupal as the trend of the day

One of the main creators of Contenta CMS distribution, Mateu Aguiló Bosch aka e0ipso, in his speech mentioned the following. He noticed “the explosion of devices and places where people want to consume content.”

Projects are no longer about websites, said the developer. They are also about having an iOS and an Android application, putting something on a Roku, an Apple watch… or even at a smart oven!

Here is where decoupled Drupal comes in. This is an architecture that allows you to entrust front-end experiences to other technologies, while Drupal serves as a data source.

This results in expanding your digital reach and, in many cases, using the best characteristics of these front-end technologies. The popular choices for Drupal today are JavaScript frameworks like Vue, React, Angular, Gatsby (built with React), and more. They are primarily characterized by blazing fast performance and interactive features.

Thanks to the API-first Initiative, Drupal is well-suited to this kind of interaction. Great helpers for developers are RESTful web services in Drupal 8 core, and now — JSON:API in Drupal 8.7 core as of May 2019. This is enhanced by useful contributed modules like GraphQL, Subrequests, Relaxed web services, and so on.

Contenta CMS distribution for decoupled Drupal out-of-box

Despite the wealth of decoupling tools in Drupal, distributions offer the easiest approaches to the setup. The idea about a decoupled distribution emerged at DrupalCon Baltimore, and then the Contenta CMS distribution was created.

Contenta works on an “API-First” basis and uses JSON:API. Its main aim is to make decoupled Drupal setup easy even for Drupal novice. It also allows front-end developers get a powerful Drupal backend without having to know “drupalisms.”

In addition to the decoupled Drupal CMS (Contenta JSON:API), there are demos for the most popular front-end technologies — Contenta React, Contenta Vue Nuxt, Contenta Angular, Contenta Gatsby, and so on.

The benefits of Contenta CMS distribution

• decoupled Drupal out-of-box from first second
• collection of the most needed modules
• friendliness to non-Drupal developers
• demo content
• detailed documentation
• demo front-end applications

Key modules included into Contenta CMS

• JSON:API is a zero-configuration module that automatically creates API endpoints to expose your Drupal entities in the JSON format.
• JSON:API Extras helps you make settings for the JSON:API module (enabling or disabling the resources, overwriting their names, and much more).
• JSON-RPC implements a remote procedure call (RPC) protocol. It lets you execute remote actions, for example, clear caches or put the site in maintenance mode.
• ContentaJS improves performance even in case of frequent requests. This is achieved by creating configuration endpoints that Node Server reads for automatic bootstrapping.
• GraphQL helps you expose data based on a GraphQL schema. The main benefits are exact queries and improved performance with no round-trips to the server.
• Decoupled Router helps you manage page routes on the front-end by providing an endpoint for exact path aliases.
• Consumers registers your Drupal data consumers and helps you create variations based on which consumers is requesting the data.
• Consumer Image Styles integrates with JSON:API and allows application developers to specify the image styles they need.

Let your decoupled Drupal setup be the smoothest!

If you want to try decoupled Drupal, be it Contenta CMS distribution or “classic” Drupal installation, you can always entrust this to our Drupal team. We offer development and support services, so you can reach out to us at whatever step you are in. Maybe decoupled Drupal is the luckiest choice for your website!