34 lines
1.9 KiB
Markdown
34 lines
1.9 KiB
Markdown
|
---
|
||
|
|
title: Should you have a separate front-end for your Drupal website?
|
||
|
|
date: 2025-01-27
|
||
|
|
permalink: daily/2025/01/27/separate-front-end
|
||
|
|
tags:
|
||
|
|
- software-development
|
||
|
|
- drupal
|
||
|
|
- front-end
|
||
|
|
cta: ~
|
||
|
|
snippet: |
|
||
|
|
Should you have a separate front-end for your Drupal website?
|
||
|
|
---
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
A few years ago, "decoupled" or "headless" Drupal was a popular approach, leveraging Drupal's built-in JSON:API module to expose its data via an API which can be consumed by a separate front-end application.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
The front-end application would retrieve the data from Drupal via the API and generate the appropriate HTML.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
It's an approach I've used in the past and [spoken about at conferences][0], but it comes with pros and cons.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
In theory, as the Drupal (or back-end application) and front-end are completely separate, there can be two separate and independent teams working on them.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
This adds overhead and complexity and I've found that one team will commonly be blocking the other instead of both being able to work in parallel.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
As I said yesterday, [previewing content in Drupal can be an issue][1] - particularly with a decoupled approach which needs a front-end to be rebuilt before the changes can be seen.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
If you have a separate front-end, you'll need to create everything from scratch, such as writing accessible HTML markup and othe standard features that would normally be provided by Drupal and, because you've got two separate front-end and back-end applications, you've got twice the amount of maintenance.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
You could also be excluding yourself from any new features that will be available in future versions of Drupal or Drupal CMS, such as the new Experience Builder.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
Whilst decoupled/headless builds are a viable option and can work well in some situations, it's not something I recommend often.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
[0]: {{site.url}}/presentations/decoupling-drupal-vuejs
|
||
|
|
[1]: {{site.url}}/daily/2025/01/26/layout-builder
|