Why Gatsby Is a Great Option for Decoupling Drupal
Creating your CMS website with headless Drupal and Gatsby is a great option as Drupal is an enterprise quality CMS for free and it can be paired with a modern development experience while enjoying all the benefits of JAMstack, performance, security and scalability.
Why Use Gatsby and Drupal Together?
Gatsby is a fast React based static site generator that can be used to create static sites and then the content can be pulled from Drupal CMS. Among various CMSes available in the market, Drupal gives a breakthrough experience, which offers powerful content modeling, UI creation, workflow capabilities, thereby helping the branding, marketing and lead generation efforts. Drupal CMS and Gatsby is a powerful combination and is also a great option for a decoupled architecture.
Decoupled Drupal has become a very popular approach and Drupal development companies in India are creating enterprise grade websites as they are familiar with the CMS. Drupal is great for:
- Content modelling and complex page layouts having multiple sections per page
- Teams that have a multi stage review processes and content creation
- Drupal developers who value using open source technologies that are highly popular
Important features of Gatsby that make it ideal for decoupling with Drupal CMS:
The Plugin Usage Makes Everything Simple and Easy:
Plugins help to make the website offline, supports inline SVGs, add Google analytics and make Gatsby extensible and flexible. There are different types of Gatsby plugins and the Gatsby source plugin helps to fetch data from the remote or local source and allows it to be used via the GraphQL. This of course implies that anything can be used as a source to work with Gatsby and then create static sites. Though some plugins may need to be listed by name, there are some others that may take options.
Also Read: The Journey of Drupal from 1.0 To Drupal 8
Developed Keeping Performance in Mind:
The Gatsby framework is created to optimize the performance of the site on its own and it compiles the Webpack configuration to create the site, once the source code is created. It works by prefetching the resources to give a world-class surfing experience to the website users. It also follows Google’s PRPL architectural pattern that aims to boost the website’s performance on mobile devices. The pattern helps to structure and serve the Progressive Web Apps and a Drupal development company can create PWA with Gatsby by running the page via HTTPS and also installing a plugin for the service worker.
PWAs Out of the Box:
Gatsby applies the best practices to boost the performance and also adds to the smoothness of the user experience to offer the users an app like experience. Gatsby boots up React on loading the page and navigates the site to give you a single page application experience having near instant transitions without page reloads. It works by prefetching the related content in the background so as to nullify the chance of delay on the user click.
It is Easy to Learn and Use:
Gatsby is based on React.JS that is a JavaScript library used to create user interfaces by using components. It is comparatively easy to learn and if you are aware of JavaScript codes, then it becomes easier. Working with Gatsby doesn’t need anyone to learn everything from the scratch and so it saves a lot of crucial time. Gatsby also has a vast and active community that helps the Drupal development company having any concerns.
Some Advantages of Decoupling Drupal with Gatsby:
Static site generators pre-generate the pages of the site, which render pages on demand, thereby alleviating the needs for a live database. Using Gatsby helps to enhance the performance and reduces the maintenance costs. The static site generators have become highly popular over the past few years and it has become the preference for Drupal developers in India who want to create a simple website with minimal server setup and low cost. Drupal is a powerful CMS and is preferred by the publishers for its WYSIWYG and content times that help them manage the content more systematically and easily.
Also Read: Differences Between Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 From A Technical and Business Perspective