Skip to main content

Shannon Soper

UX designer and educational psychology, music, & art fan. Keeps up with her dog's Instagram fans @dgtrwatson.

2 min read · August 13th 2018

Using Decoupled Drupal with Gatsby

Why use Drupal + Gatsby together?

Kyle Mathews is presenting on “Gatsby + Drupal” at Decoupled Drupal Days NYC this Saturday; for those who can’t make it to his presentation, we wanted to give you a sneak peek of what it will be about.

(Hint: it’s about how nicely Gatsby and Drupal work together!)

Take a look at the source code of the official Gatsby + Drupal example site or see it live. Gatsby co-founder, Kyle Mathews, has a long history with Drupal and built this example site in Gatsby’s early days:

Screenshot of decoupled Drupal site build with Gatsby

A delicious Gatsby + Drupal site

Using Drupal as a headless CMS with Gatsby is a great way to get an enterprise-quality CMS for free, paired with a great modern development experience and all the benefits of the JAMstack, like performance, scalability, and security.

It only takes a few steps to use Gatsby with Drupal as a headless CMS (also known as decoupled Drupal).

How to implement Drupal + Gatsby

Hooking up Gatsby to a new or existing Drupal site takes just a few steps:

  • Add the gatsby-source-drupal plugin to your Gatsby site
  • Configure the plugin with your Drupal credentials & hosted URL
  • Access all your Drupal data using GraphQL queries

Why use Gatsby and Drupal together?

“Decoupled Drupal” has become an increasingly popular approach to building enterprise-grade websites, and has the full-throated support of Drupal community leaders. Using Gatsby in a decoupled Drupal setup allows your team to access the powerful content modeling and access workflow capabilities of Drupal 8, as well as the powerful UI creation & performance toolset of Gatsby.

When is Drupal a great choice?

Many development teams, content teams, and client decision-makers are familiar with Drupal. Here are some scenarios in which Drupal is a great choice (and a few scenarios for which it’s not-so-great):

Drupal is great for:

  • Complex page layouts or content modelling with multiple sections per page
  • Teams with multi-stage content creation and review processes
  • Development teams who value using popular, open-source technologies

Drupal is not-so-great for:

  • Content teams who require a slick content editing experience
  • Teams requiring the use of Drupal UI Kit

Interested in learning more?

Using Gatsby together with Drupal offers a powerful, full-featured, open-source, and free alternative for expensive enterprise content management systems. To learn more:

Tagged with cms, drupalView all Tags

Enjoyed this post? Receive the next one in your inbox!

Docs
Tutorials
Plugins
Blog
Showcase