So, thoughts on the Headless Drupal discussions.
1: I’m a huge proponent of decoupling presentation from content management and editorial tools. Makes redesigns much less painful.
2: I also think that the FED world is moving way faster than Drupal can keep up; decoupling lets FEDs do more on their terms, which is good.
3: These techniques have been around for a long time; we and other shops have been building decoupled sites for years. It works.
4: ‘Headless’ implies complete decoupling — a Drupal backend that just exposes an API for GET/POST/etc of content resources, auth, etc.
5: Completely decoupling Drupal, right now, comes with drawbacks some projects may not be able to accept.
6: Layout control by editors is much harder. UI localization can’t rely on Drupal, and is harder for admins to tweak w/o front end work.
7: And if the requests aren’t batched effectively, it can incur lots of expensive roundtrips/bootstraps.
8: Those are very solvable problems, but still hurdles. If you’re contemplating a headless Drupal project, think through those issues.
9: That said, I think most Drupal sites will eventually be decoupled — it isn’t a new idea, it’s a proven approach throughout the CMS world.