Revolutionizing Decoupled Development: an Open-source Blueprint for Drupal and Next.js projects

At Wunder, we love Drupal, and one of the biggest reasons for that is because it provides such a solid base for pretty much anything you can think of doing with a website: its core and the countless open-source modules you can add to it will get you most of the way there. Then, we come in and add custom functionality on top to achieve the goals of the organizations that hire us as digital partners.

Over the years, we have also explored the possibilities of decoupled architectures, where Drupal is used as a fantastic backend and content management system for content editors while the users of the application interact with a frontend built with the latest Javascript technologies. We believe that this is one of the most exciting spaces in Drupal today, where experimentation can lead to great things: happy users, happy frontend developers, and happy clients.

Over the years, we have built and delivered many decoupled applications with Drupal. But we feel that what was missing were established procedures and reusable solutions that keep the value proposition of open-source in general and Drupal in particular: what is _the_ way of building a decoupled site with Drupal nowadays? How can we avoid having to reinvent the same things at each project?

While looking for an answer, we found the excellent “Next for Drupal” projectOpens in a new tab by Chapter ThreeOpens in a new tab: a solution that marries Drupal and Next.js to easily build decoupled sites and, more importantly to us – offers a series of standard ways to achieve the usual features that our clients request from us.

So, we took the examples that the project provided and pushed further with localization, translation, a set of standard content types and paragraphs, a search system, a safe typescript implementation, the frontend tools that we like to use (TailwindCSS, Storybook), everything packaged in a one-command setup to get up and running in minutes. And then, of course, we published it on GitHub for everyone to try out.

Instead of starting from scratch each time, we believe this approach can save days, if not weeks of setup times for the development teams, freeing their tables from having to come up with individual solutions for common problems and concentrating on building the features that really matter, all while using the latest frontend technologies.

Meet the Visionaries Behind the Innovation: The driving force behind the groundbreaking next-drupal-starterkit initiative is the passionate minds at Wunder – Mario Vercellotti and Joshua Scott. With a shared commitment to efficiency and innovation, this dynamic duo brings a wealth of experience and a fresh perspective to the world of decoupled architectures. Check out the recording, get inspired, and contact us for more information on utilizing this blueprint in your digital environment.