What Is Headless Drupal?

Headless Drupal offers a multitude of advantages for both developers and marketers alike

Vishal Yadav
2 min readMar 12, 2024

Headless Drupal is an exciting trend in web development today, and it’s gaining popularity for good reasons. Drupal, an open-source platform used by millions, helps create sophisticated digital experiences. With Headless Drupal, developers have even more freedom to craft engaging web, mobile, and digital content, which is crucial for customer engagement and brand building.

Understanding Drupal architectures

Drupal, a widely used content management system (CMS), drives numerous prominent websites and digital encounters. Supported by a vast community of 118,000 active developers and contributors, this open-source platform undergoes continuous enhancement and expansion. Renowned for its reliability, scalability, and security, Drupal serves as the backbone for digital experiences utilized by millions of individuals and businesses.

It comprises backend systems for content storage, organization, and management, alongside frontend tools for rendering content for user viewing or interaction. Distinguished from conventional CMSs, Drupal adopts an API-first approach and relies on discrete, composable systems, allowing versatility in various architectures or modes tailored to specific requirements.

Unified:- In this setup, Drupal handles both showing content on the website and managing it behind the scenes. It uses a system called Twig to create the actual web pages from the content it manages.

Decoupled:- Here, Drupal only manages the content in the background. It doesn’t directly show it on the website. Instead, it stores the content and provides it to other systems through special connections called APIs. These other systems then take care of displaying the content on the website. It’s like having a separate warehouse for storing items, and different delivery services bring those items to customers.

Hybrid:- This is a mix of the two approaches above. Some parts of the website are tightly connected to Drupal, meaning Drupal manages and displays those parts. Other parts use a separate system, like a JavaScript framework, to manage and show the content. It’s like having a store where some shelves are stocked directly from the warehouse (Drupal), while others are stocked by a delivery service (JavaScript framework).

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