Ed is a technical content writer with more than seven years of experience. He loves crafting compelling content that explains complex technology in ways that make it easy to understand.
Should You Use Headless Drupal? Pros and Cons of Decoupled Architecture
Business requirements for web applications have significantly changed over the years. That’s because today the number of channels in which application data might be used is enormous. Your app can be accessed not only from a smartphone or a laptop, but also from a tablet, a smartwatch, an IoT device, a VR system, and pretty much any tech piece with an operating system and internet access.
Considering this, it should come as no surprise that a simple website or app is no longer enough. What businesses want is full-fledged solutions that work seamlessly in different environments, offer extensive customization capabilities, and support a wide range of modern technologies.
Headless Drupal architecture makes the creation of such applications possible.
As an expert Drupal developer, AnyforSoft is here to discuss the headless Drupal approach. In the following paragraphs, we describe what it is, compare it to other architectures, and list its pros and cons to help you answer the question: Should I use headless Drupal for my business?
Keep reading to learn more!
What is headless Drupal?
So what does “headless Drupal” mean?
To understand it, we should first explain the traditional architecture.
Like any content management system, Drupal consists of a front end and a back end. The back end stores, organizes, and manages content, while the front end renders content for users to view and interact with. Normally, when creating Drupal websites, developers use what is known as the traditional (or unified) approach in which the Drupal CMS is responsible for both the front end and the back end of the application.
When it comes to Drupal as a headless CMS, its front end is decoupled from the back end (hence the name “decoupled Drupal”). With this approach, Drupal is responsible for the back end only, whereas the front end is built with a separate framework (Vue.js, Angular, React.js, etc.). In this case, Drupal serves as a content repository that stores data and makes it available via APIs to the front-end systems of the developer’s choice.
The headless CMS doesn’t return the page in the form of HTML code but uses REST API to generate the response in JSON, HAL, or XML format. This architecture gives more freedom to developers, as they’re not limited to Drupal’s tools and can use any front-end frameworks to create the visual part of the application.
