Customers Demand Real-Time Content
Headless CMS has been a trend that has been gaining traction over the past several years. It is driven by the rise in simple frontend programming languages (notably JavaScript) for applications that need the power of a content management system (CMS), like Drupal.
There are many ways to decouple Drupal from your front end, but the turning point in adoption seems to be the rise of isomorphic JavaScript. This method eliminates some of the challenges like slow page rendering and poor SEO performance by adding a runtime (Node.js) into the architecture. This allows the designer to be less reliant on client-side rendering to present their application, thus addressing these key challenges.
An example of how a successful decoupled experience is the New York’s Metro Transit Authority (MTA). Riders on the MTA demand real-time updates to the transit schedule through the digital signage in New York’s subway stations. JavaScript is really good at quickly handling real time data to enable blazing-fast updates to their sites. What this case study embodies is that consumers expect information to be updated and available in real time.
The ‘Omnichannel’ Experience
Omnichannel is a buzzword that is thrown around a lot. What it usually refers to is customers want to be able to transition seamlessly from the many connected devices they have. Sounds easy, right?
The reality is that as devices and platforms emerged over the last decade, so too did a number of ways to develop applications for them. HTML, CSS, Swift, JavaScript, and C# are just a few languages used.
Decoupled architectures enable you to support all of these different types of applications from a single CMS, like Drupal. Through an API-first design, your development team is free to work with its preferred frontend language.
We covered how this could work at Acquia Engage this year, using a commerce example (video starts at 23:10 for decoupled commerce in Node.js).