Session

Decoupling Drupal is nothing new but it remains a great way to building websites that go beyond Drupal.  In the past couple of years so many tools and options have become available which allows for a decoupled Drupal solution.  Today we will learn about GatsbyJS, a react based Static Site Generator (SSG), that makes it easy to built a React Front-End while keeping the power of Drupal in the back end as well as all the editorial tools Drupal offers.

Gatsby is an incredibly fast static site generator which offers a growing number of plugins to extend its functionality.  In this session we will use the gatsby-source-drupal plugin which simplifies calls to Drupal APIs and retrieve content.  Gatsby in addition to being React ready it also offers GraphQL which is a great way to query/pull data from most data sources out there.

This sounds like a pretty complicated process and it can actually be, however, Gatsby makes it very easy and powerful.  In this session we will create an API endpoint in Drupal using the JSON API Module, which Gatsby will use to retrieve our site content such a Article nodes and render them as React pages or components.