Drupal has originated and elaborated one of the most flexible, opportunity-rich website development approaches up to date. Headless development allows putting Drupal capacities into the core of the website while the frontend can be built however you wish - using other technologies of choice and connecting everything to the backend foundation through an API. At that, the Drupal core handles content storing and editing, providing a wide range of convenient tools that stood the test of time and expanded with the help of a passionate Drupal community.
As with any software creation method and technique, headless Drupal development has its goals and purposes. So does this approach really fit your particular project needs? And where is the headless method headed (sorry for the pun) in the nearest future? Let’s dig in and figure it out.
What’s Headless Drupal Development All About?
It’s as simple as that - Drupal powers the backend while the frontend is separated (decoupled) and customized to the very liking of the client or some other product owner. Hence the “headless” term. This is ultimately convenient in that the sturdy Drupal foundation can be used while your frontend specialists savvy in Javascript, PHP, or some other programming language can flexibly work on the frontend design.
And the main advantage of Drupal being put in the foundation of a website is its unprecedented API content serving capacities. It was created with multi-faceted content consumption in mind, thus offering a reliable backend content repository system. This came in as a much sought-after solution for every project in need of distributing content across multiple outlets of different formats - apps, connected hardware (IoT devices, advertising panels, etc.).
With such a universal take on website creation and management, companies and entrepreneurs acquired ultimate time- and cost-saving, performance streamlining opportunities, putting Drupal at the forefront of modern website development. But there’s more.
Here are other benefits of Drupal-based headless development.
2. Multiple sites creation
Do you need to create the main website that will serve as a hub to access several smaller sites? Drupal’s Microsite Manager tool allows creating multiple separate resources that share the same content base. A single content engine thus becomes responsible for supplying content to as many microsites with different customized frontends as you like.
This is where the so-called micro-frontend architecture comes into play - monolithic website structures are broken down into smaller separate components. These components then serve as independent applications forming the mentioned microsites. And the best thing about all this is that these are bits of a bigger picture that can be designed differently yet remain bound by the single codebase.
3. Flexible collaboration
Drupal professionals are highly demanded and can even be scarce when it comes to hiring. With Drupal, however, once the foundation is laid, you may turn to specialists of a completely different profile (those working with more popular programming languages) that would readily create a custom frontend based on the essential market practices. There is also a great chance to diversify workflow where specialists with different backgrounds share and fuse practices to achieve something greater.
Things are taken even further with the component-driven architecture development principle. Headless Drupal grants an awesome ability to reuse a variety of underlying components due to the modular development nature. This results in a number of benefits, making the development faster, integrations smoother, code more maintainable, and scaling more streamlined.
4. Less technological dependency
For many companies and entrepreneurs out there, it may not be the best fit to get the whole website built in and managed by Drupal - it can be less costly and complex to involve other more common and lighter libraries in the frontend creation. Let alone all the diverse customization possibilities one gets. And the existing complex backend doesn’t need to be refactored or re-engineered in any way.
As a whole, Drupal has a native headless predisposition, offering all the related tools and capacities straight out of the box. And there are tons of significant contributions made regularly by the extensive Drupal community.
The built-in RESTful module allows managing all the standard Drupal entities (from users and nodes to comments, taxonomy, and other objects) without any extra integrations. To complete that, the JSON:API module offers simple website integration capabilities and more versatile entity management tools. And the best thing is that those modules are fully native, working in the core of the Drupal engine.
With all this tech and business benefits galore, what’s the catch, you may ask? There is no catch but you need to set a few things straight and really understand whether the decoupled principle is what you need.
Nuances to Consider and Challenges of Drupal Headless Development
Yes, headless streamlines and simplifies many cumbersome things in particular situations. However, decoupled website infrastructures are more complex than traditional websites as a whole. So make sure to analyze the length of the required effort and underlying costs before indulging in the available benefits and advantages. Some major considerations should include the following.
Do you have what it takes?
According to the headless development principle, there are two separate parts of a website - backend and frontend. And they must be managed by two responsible specialists or teams of specialists. This means more workflow communication and coordination efforts. Ultimately, this results in higher general development costs and post-launch maintenance expenses. The latter is because it takes more effort to maintain a decoupled website structure. In particular, deployments of structures must be orchestrated in perfect sync.
Can you handle the challenges?
Then, there are SEO and shareability issues. Today’s main search engines favor javascript-based web resources, but decoupled websites - not so much. So if search engine traffic is among your essential business assets, headless may not be the best fit. You will also have to go the extra mile and make sure that every piece of content has an individual URL in order to be shared across social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. On top of that, for content to be displayed properly, you need to grant it the way to do so without enabled javascript.
How to tackle these challenges?
If you do rely on search engine traffic yet still need Drupal, SEO can be boosted with the help of React-based open-source frameworks introduced by the community. Top options include Gatsbyjs and Nextjs, both enabling server-side web page rendering that is smoothly expanded into an elegant frontend interface. A lightweight custom server-side script that returns metadata descriptions to routes can also be employed to improve SEO and tackle the challenge of shareability across other online services.
Progressive Decoupling - a Decent Alternative to Headless
There is another major approach alternative to Drupal decoupling that may serve as a compromise for some companies or entrepreneurs - you partly decouple the website with the help of progressive decoupling. This is when Drupal remains at the core of the system, managing server requests and assembling the returned pages, yet the page is enriched with custom Javascript-based interactive elements. Javascript then pulls up all the required data through the REST API coming with Drupal out-of-the-box.
This may be a better fitting solution for you in a couple of cases. One is that your site may have few interactive elements that need Javascript capacities to run. The second is that your site may employ external data sources that aren’t well-compatible with Drupal - embedded Javascript helps fetch data directly from such sources.
Thus, there are two major ways to decouple a Drupal website in all:
1. Progressively - you can use the Drupal rendering system with the simultaneous use of Javascript frameworks (for instance, React or Angular). This approach is about decoupling a js framework-based page, maintaining the speed and unlocked assemblers for developers. And as for designers, there are contextualized interfaces, content workflow, previews, and other features available.
2. Fully - the frontend and backend are fully decoupled, replacing the branch theme layer with another frontend technology. In this case, front and back are located in different domains/subdomains and may well be considered different applications.
Bottom Line
The future of headless Drupal development is very dependable yet already looking pretty bright. As the underlying technology expands and the ever-devoted community contributes more optimization to the engine, so should the control and accessibility of employing headless development optimize for wider use.
Once these essential issues are elevated, we are looking at a possible advent of Drupal headless development. From here on out, weigh out your own decisions whether to go with more traditional approaches or adapt Drupal decoupling and, quite probably, gain a long-term benefit.
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