Headless Drupal
What is headless Drupal? In the concept of headless Drupal, under the “head” is understood exactly what many are accustomed to call the "face", i.e. the whole layer of theming is the theme itself and everything that is directly responsible for HTML rendering. The second name of this concept - decoupled - means "divided", which implies that the rendering functions are still performed somewhere, but not in Drupal. In general, in headless systems, Drupal returns data not in the form of HTML pages, but through REST services in JSON, XML, HAL, etc.
What is Decoupled Drupal
What is decoupled Drupal? A decoupled website with one CMS. Decoupled websites, also referred to as “headless browsing” CMS, break apart the front-end and back-end into separate entities. Essentially, when we “decouple,” we are separating the back-end functionality and database from the front-end HTML content. Each entity can have separate code bases and even live on separate servers. This is the one of our best Drupal development services.
Headless website
The main cases of applying this approach are approximately the following:
- when access to content is carried out through mobile applications;
- when the content was originally intended to be sent to another system (automated data exchange);
- when need to develop a regular site.
Additionally, you could also have two backend CMS, like Drupal and Magento, that feed out to multiple front-ends. In this scenario, a single content update in one back-end location could update front-end live content in multiple places. For example, changing a product description could simultaneously change the product description on a business-facing website, consumer-facing website, and a mobile application.
Why headless Drupal is a reason
Security
By separating the back and front-ends, you are potentially providing an added layer of security. All other things being equal, a customized, a headless website is less likely to get hacked. While this isn’t guaranteed, it certainly adds a security barrier.
Less upgrading
With a decoupled Drupal, there’s less of a need to continually upgrade since isolating the back-end code, and not using the supplied front-end code, should provide some hardening.
Complexity
While using something “out-of-the-box” is the quickest and most economical solution, decoupling is taking something apart and putting it back together again differently. This is obviously adding some very fundamental complexities, and might even call for two development teams with separate specialities.
Why do I need all this?
The most important problem facing the Drupal development of new technologies is motivation. We will try to give it to you:D. In a nutshell, when building bus sines or even Drupal e-Commerce sites, using the principle of Drupal headless CMS + some modern JS framework, you can easily create websites with a really cool and fast interface. At the same time, the following advantages appear for the developer:
✅ What you previously did with jQuery can now be done much faster.
✅ At times, the setup of Drupal itself is accelerated
✅ You no longer need to install or write modules for "decorations" yourself
✅ Reduces server load and as a result high load website
✅ Headless website - is the future.
By having a headless Drupal 8, you are less constrained by whatever CMS you are using. CMS, such as Drupal, provide the core back-end CMS functionalities, and traditionally the front-end functionality by using what’s called “themes.”
Ask our developers to advise you with the better variant.