Code less, accomplish more: decoupling Drupal with GraphQL

Speaker(s)

peter.keppert

Session track

Sitebuilding

Experience level

Intermediate

Duration

50 min

What does it take to create a complex, fully decoupled website where Drupal is just managing content and all rendering is performed by a client-side single page application? Surprisingly little.

I will demonstrate how we successfully utilized Drupal and GraphQL to build a modern customer-facing enterprise web platform and explain it from the architecture point of view. I will introduce our multisite environment, where content from multiple Drupal installations is served by one universal Angular application and how GraphQL helped us minimize the amount of coding required on Drupal side and shift our focus to frontend.

Starting with introduction of GraphQL, I will then briefly explain the basic concepts of the language, illustrate the problems it aims to solve, why it was developed and why we chose it.

Most importantly, I will show real-life examples from our journey that anybody willing to utilize GraphQL finds indispensable:
- flexible sitebuilding - utilizing Paragraphs to structure content in Drupal to allow content editors to create appealing pages in no time
- practical examples of GraphQL queries used to retrieve page content
- writing custom GraphQL resolver or overriding existing resolvers
- GraphQL-related performance and security considerations

You will see how lean the custom codebase on Drupal side can be, permitting to achieve amazing results in no time.

This session has been introduced at Drupalcamp Poland 2018. This time, it will be less technical and focused on content management aspect.