#headless drupal

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Drupal is a sophisticated and extremely advanced content management system (CMS). It is an excellent solution to create dynamic content, media files, and social media presence through your eCommerce website. With custom website development using Drupal, you can not only manage numerous concurrent clients simultaneously but also have strong in-class security. Drupal is highly functional when compared to other technologies. It has helped a lot of businesses around the globe to enhance their functionality and services with its flawless real-time functions.

However, a term called “Headless Drupal” has recently been the wave of the future expecting Drupal to become even more powerful. So let us first understand what Headless Drupal is and then we will quickly move on to its benefits.

What is Headless Drupal?​

If you’re already involved with Drupal you must have observed this trend or probably participated in the discussions. It kept popping up in the Drupal events, blogs and also on social media sites. For those who are unaware, it is a simple conceptual change in standard Drupal. It includes two major changes as mentioned below:

Drupal offers data in JSON format instead of HTML

A front-end user interface (UI) framework, like AngularJS, React, or EmberJS delivers the data to create a webpage.

Basically, it is an approach that uses Drupal as a Backend Content Repository as well as REST Server. The REST Server allows other applications to read and update the content of the data, whereas Drupal on the other hand stores and manages the content. From this point, Drupal processes the data to the application built using angular, ember or backbone. To understand better, see the picture below:​

However, Drupal has some drawbacks to which Jeff Eaton says, "Completely decoupling Drupal, right now, comes with drawbacks some projects may not be able to accept. Layout control by editors is much harder. UI localization can’t rely on Drupal and is harder for admins to tweak w/o front end work. And if the requests aren’t batched effectively, it can incur lots of expensive roundtrips/bootstraps."

Following Jeff’s above-mentioned Twitter comment, Jared Ponchot said, "It's also worth noting that complete decoupling favors a design system that values complete tailoring over flexibility. The ongoing evolution of content requires front-end focused teams also involved in accounting for resulting evolution in the presentation."

In short, the Headless Drupal often leads to a loss of flexibility. The available options can be limited to those utilizing the website through the normal Drupal admin panel and it relies heavily on the ability of the front end developers. But otherwise, here are some notable benefits that Drupal provides.

Benefits of Headless Drupal:​​

It transfers the responsibility from the user to the browser and is easily scalable.

It allows you to collaborate with different teams easily. For instance - Team Web frontend, Team Backend, Team Android App, and Team iOS App. They can work independently as the applications are not related to Drupal.

It helps to develop truly interactive experiences with the use of functional in-browser apps, speeding up the website by streaming the backend.

High-quality performance and more ‘future proof’.

Installing and maintaining Drupal is easy. Headless Drupal entirely is both a kind of challenge and fun for developers. Moreover, it assists the front end developers to render quicker and richer user experiences.