Gatsby and Drupal: Did we just become best friends?

Decoupling with Drupal has been a topic of much discussion in recent years. With the shift towards more projects being built for multi-channel experiences including mobile apps, wearable devices, digital signage and others, Drupal’s powerful capabilities of flexibility around structured data and editorial experience have worked hard to adapt. With an API First Initiative that has helped land JSON API in core, the work on rebuilding the admin UI in React, and more, we’ve also seen that Drupal is moving to embrace the JavaScript revolution that has happened in the last few years.

One of the biggest issues with decoupling has been the lack of a best practice model for the presentation layer, especially given the fact that many existing Drupal development teams lack expertise in modern JavaScript frameworks, and many JavaScript experts lack experience or interest in traditional CMS’s.

GatsbyJS entered the space as one exciting way to address these problems. As an opinionated and “fast by default” React platform that is built specifically for API integrations, Gatsby fills an important void and might help establish some best practices for what decoupling Drupal should look like.

As with any decoupling solution, it does bring some complicating factors. How do we deal with features we are used to getting in Drupal quite painlessly, like pathauto, contextual editing links, high fidelity preview, translations, etc? At Third and Grove, we have been working with the Gatsby core team to explore and help find solutions to some of these gaps.

This session will go over the use case for when to integrate Gatsby and Drupal (and when not to), the gaps that exist, and how we are approaching solving them. Teaser alert - it will also include the first public demo ever of live preview in Gatsby of Drupal content.