Setting the Stage: Hosting a Decoupled Drupal site

We’ve launched many websites with Acquia, but a recent project for the ski industry is especially notable and worth spending some time with. Over the next month, through a series of posts, we will take a deep dive into decoupled Drupal. With our hosting partner, we will outline how Elevated Third, Hoorooh Digital, and Acquia worked together to create a decoupled site for the Powdr Resorts, one of the largest ski operators in North America.

Corey Wood, Technical Account Manager at Acquia, starts us off with...

Part 1: Setting the Stage: Hosting a Decoupled Drupal site.

Powdr Ski Resorts was facing a familiar challenge: the websites in their network of ski resorts were on a collection of disparate content management systems, which made it difficult to govern their digital properties across multiple brands and sites. Powdr needed a digital solution that provides each brand in the Powdr family the flexibility required to deliver customized web experience for their users.

Powdr turned to Elevated Third, Hoorooh Digital, and Acquia to build and design the first in the next generation of sites, a Decoupled Drupal 8 site for Boreal Mountain Resort. Elevated Third spearheaded the decoupled Drupal development; Hoorooh Digital supported the website’s frontend design; Acquia provided the cloud hosting, the technical account manager, and 24/7 global support.

This series will detail how the three teams worked together to bring the project to the finish line.

But first, a refresher.

What is Decoupled Drupal?

A decoupled CMS allows developers to utilize any technology to render the front-end experience (“the glass” where a user interacts with an application) in lieu of the theming and presentation layers that come with a coupled CMS out-of-the-box. In a decoupled Drupal architecture, the Drupal back end exposes content to other front-end systems, such as native mobile applications, conversational UIs, or applications built in JavaScript frameworks.

JavaScript frameworks are increasing in popularity due to the demand for more flexibility in the front end, in addition to the promise of increased productivity and maintainable code. Many JavaScript frameworks exist, but some of the most popular include Ember, React, and Angular.

Drupal can function as a services layer to allow content created in the Drupal CMS to be presented through a JavaScript framework. Drupal’s robust collection of web services and flexible APIs means that any system can consume data from Drupal with ease.

Read the entire article, including Corey’s take on hosting a decoupled Drupal project, here.