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.

Table of Contents

Part I: Decoupled Drupal Fundamentals

Chapter 1: The Changing Web

Chapter 2: The Server Side: From Monolithic to Decoupled CMS

Chapter 3: The Client Side: From Static to Dynamic Pages

Chapter 4: Decoupled Drupal

Chapter 5: Advantages of Decoupled Drupal

Chapter 6: Disadvantages of Decoupled Drupal

Part II: Decoupling Drupal

Chapter 7: Decoupling Drupal 8 Core

Chapter 8: Decoupling Drupal 8 with Contributed Modules

Chapter 9: Authenticating Requests in Drupal 8

Part III: Consuming and Manipulating Drupal 8

Chapter 10: Core REST

Chapter 11: Using Views with Core REST

Chapter 12: JSON API in Drupal

Chapter 13: RELAXed Web Services

Chapter 14: GraphQL in Drupal

Part IV: The Decoupled Drupal Ecosystem

Chapter 15: API-First Distributions

Chapter 16: Software Development Kits and Reference Builds

Part V: Integration with Consumers

Chapter 17: React

Chapter 18: React Native

Chapter 19: Angular

Chapter 20: Vue.js

Chapter 21: Ember

Part VI: Advanced Topics in Decoupled Drupal

Chapter 22: The REST Plug-in System

Chapter 23: Contributed Modules for Advanced Use Cases

Chapter 24: Schemas and Generated Documentation

Chapter 25: Caching

Chapter 26: The Future of Decoupled Drupal

About the Author

Preston So has been a web developer since 2001, a Drupal developer since 2007, a Drupal contributor since 2009, and a globally recognized expert on decoupled Drupal since 2015. Currently, he works as Director of Research and Innovation at Acquia, where he is the primary subject matter expert and evangelist for decoupled Drupal and API-first approaches. Previously, he led the Entertainment Weekly development team at Time Inc. (now Meredith). Over the last decade, he has given talks at over 50 conferences on five continents in multiple languages on a variety of topics, including front-end development, responsive design, user experience, Drupal development, open-source innovation, emerging technologies (conversational interfaces, augmented reality), the decentralized web, and decoupled Drupal. He has presented at SXSW Interactive twice (2017, 2018) and at industry conferences around the world, including Frontend United, Great Wide Open, and others. He has also delivered keynotes at conferences on four continents in multiple languages on the subject of decoupled Drupal.