Composable Drupal: Best Practices for Agility
Ready to make your digital projects more agile and adaptable? Composable architecture, with Drupal at its heart, empowers you to build new websites, landing pages, and channels at lightning speed. This means marketers can deliver the right content at the right time, while developers gain precious time to focus on high-value innovation.
Let's dive into the best practices for building a composable Drupal ecosystem!
Building Blocks for Success: Reusable Front-End Components
Drupal's Layout Builder is a game-changer, and here's why: it lets marketers create awesome pages without needing a developer. How?
By providing a library of pre-built, reusable components.
Think of these like building blocks – text sections, image galleries, call-to-action buttons... anything your site commonly needs. Need a new landing page? Marketers can drag and drop these components into a flexible layout, publish, and boom – it's live!
Enterprise-Grade Experience with Drupal 10 CMS
Drupal 10 takes this flexibility even further. Not only can marketers build pages, but they can also customize the look and feel of those components. This means staying on-brand is easier than ever. Drupal 10 ensures a slick user experience for your team while providing developers with the tools they need to get everything set up quickly.
Streamlined Development: CI/CD and Composer
Reusable components are awesome, but an efficient development process is vital for a composable approach. Here's where CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) and Composer shine:
- CI/CD: Imagine a robot assistant for your developers. It automatically checks code for errors, runs tests, and prepares everything for deployment. This saves time and prevents headaches down the line!
- Composer: This tool keeps your Drupal project organized. It helps ensure everyone is using the same versions of modules, themes, and even Drupal core itself – key to keeping things running smoothly.
Isolating Business Logic: The Key to Adaptability
In a composable system, it's wise to keep your business logic (code, data mappings for integrations) as separate as possible. Why? Because change is inevitable! By keeping this logic centralized, you'll be ready when it's time to swap out an email marketing platform or update how your website interacts with other systems.
Future-Prep Your System
We can't predict the future, but we can future-prep! Isolating business logic is one example. Another might be how you store data. Using a structured format (like JSON) makes it easier to connect your Drupal site to new tools and systems that may emerge down the line.
Conclusion: Composable Drupal = Agility
By embracing composable principles, you're giving your organization the power to adapt and thrive in a constantly shifting digital landscape. Drupal provides the perfect foundation, allowing your marketers to create amazing experiences while giving developers the space to build truly innovative solutions.
Author Bio
Firas Ghunaim is a digital marketing and user experience expert with 14+ years experience building digital experiences on Drupal technology.