Three approaches to building your next Drupal site

As consultants, we are often asked to recommend the best approach for building a Drupal site. The answer, as with many questions is, it depends. For some clients, the best choice is to build a traditional, coupled Drupal website. For other clients, it makes sense to build a completely decoupled solution using Drupal as the backend. And for others, the best solution is somewhere in between.

Many factors determine which is the best approach for a particular client and their situation. We'll review some key questions you can ask to help you pick the right solution for your organization.

Transcript

1. Three approaches to building your next Drupal site
2. Senior Director, Acquia Development Le’Rhone Walker Drupal.org: lerhone Twitter: lerhonewalker Web: Lerhonewalker.com
4. 1. How to Approach Drupal Builds 2. Questions to Ask to Determine the Best Approach 3. Common Pitfalls to Avoid
5. How to Approach Drupal Builds
6. Proprietary & Confidential 6 Do these sound familiar? • It would be great if it didn't take weeks to update the home page. • We have the content ready, now we just need to coordinate with the developers to add it to the website. • We have a great story to tell for our brand and products, but it is hard to build a compelling story in our current website.
7. Proprietary & Confidential 7 Today we are going to tilt our focus a bit more toward technology and talk about how the approach you choose when working with Drupal can enable you to achieve various business objectives and deliver transformation brand experiences in different ways.
8. Proprietary & Confidential 8 Drupal Rendered Progressively Decoupled Fully Decoupled The Spectrum of Approaches to Drupal Out of the box Drupal with content displayed using templates, Layout Builder, or Acquia Site Studio Some content is Drupal rendered while other content is rendered outside of Drupal via APIs The Drupal backend is completely separate from the frontend experience
9. Questions to Ask to Determine the Best Approach
10. Proprietary & Confidential 10 1. What is the business problem you are trying to solve? 2. Where is your organization in terms of digital maturity? 3. What resources and skill sets do you need to build and maintain the site? 4. Which Drupal features are important to your organization?
11. Proprietary & Confidential 11 What is the business problem you are trying to solve? • Do you need to tightly control how content is rendered? • Do you want your content/marketing teams to work independently? • Are you looking to support multiple channels, like mobile apps and digital signs, besides your website? • Are you looking to upgrade your Drupal 7 site to Drupal 9? • Is this part of a DXP project where you are looking to tie together the CMS with other systems?
12. Proprietary & Confidential 12 Where is your organization in terms of digital maturity? • Who will be adding and maintaining content on the site? What are their skills? • Is there a team of dedicated content creators or is this just one of many responsibilities for a person?
13. Proprietary & Confidential 13 What resources and skill sets do you need? • What is the development team's composition? • What are the frameworks they have experience with? • Does the team have deep knowledge of React and Gatsby (or other relevant frameworks)?
14. Proprietary & Confidential 14 Which Drupal features are important to your organization? • Are there features of Drupal that do not fit your needs? • When does building a custom solution make sense over pre-built functionality? • What matters more to your organization?
15. Proprietary & Confidential 15 Drupal Rendered Progressively Decoupled Fully Decoupled How to Approach Drupal Builds • "Plain Drupal" • Component-based (Layout Builder) • Low-code (Site Studio) • Enables the greatest flexibility • Also the most complex • Serve up data upon request via API calls • Easier to compose and present content from multiple systems
16. Proprietary & Confidential +
17. Common Pitfalls to Avoid
18. Proprietary & Confidential 18 Decoupling Too Much
19. Proprietary & Confidential 19 Failing to Have the Correct Stakeholders Involved
20. Proprietary & Confidential 20 Failing to Plan for the Future
21. Summary
22. Thank you. Le’Rhone Walker Senior Director, Acquia Development Bounteous Locate this session at the DrupalCon Europe 2021 website and take the survey for each session: https://events.drupal.org/europe2021/schedule/all