Progressive Decoupling: A case study with PRI

Presenter: Patrick Coffey, Four Kitchens

In 2015, Dries published a blog post titled “The Future of Decoupled Drupal”. In this post, he outlines several ways to approach “decoupling”, a fancy word that refers to the process of migrating from a monolithic CMS to an API-driven, distributed architecture.

One of the concepts Dries outlined in this post is “progressive decoupling”, or moving certain components or pages of a site towards an API-driven architecture, one piece at a time. Since this post was published, there has been a lot of buzz within the Drupal community about this new concept.

Public Radio International (PRI) has been running on a Drupal 7 site for just about 5 years now. As their organizational needs have grown, they began approaching the idea of migrating to an API-driven architecture to support new and upcoming technical requirements. Four Kitchens has been working with the PRI team for a few months now to iteratively pull parts of the site out of the Drupal frontend and into a modern JavaScript system, powered by PRI’s new API.

In this session, we’ll be talking through the following points:

• Scenarios in which progressive decoupling is an appropriate path.
• PRI’s organizational goals and technical requirements that necessitated a progressively decoupled approach.
• Detailed architectural overview of the mechanisms PRI and Four Kitchens successfully built to support this approach.
• Tools we built during this initiative that you can use to save time when you decide to migrate from a CMS monolith to a distributed architecture.
• Challenges we faced during the project, and how we overcame them.

Refreshments sponsored by Amazee Labs

-- Details --

When: Doors open at 6, presentation starts at 6:30.
Parking: Free parking is available at the building.