Taming the Octopus: Drupal as a Multi-Product Content Hub for the Web, Native Applications, and Touchscreen Interactives

Drupal’s configuration flexibility makes it a good choice for a headless/decoupled CMS. A common use case is separating your CMS from your front-end rendering layer (so you can front-end tools like Angular, Ember, or React). But what if your CMS has to serve not just one potential product, but five? This session will discuss how Bluecadet approaches building CMSes for everything, from websites to native apps and touchscreen interactives, sometimes all at once. For example, one recent project for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum synthesized their many different systems (which Bluecadet nicknamed “The Octopus”) to create a unified Drupal CMS that would render a fully-redesigned website *and* serve data to:

* a 200-ft touch wall
* native iOS and Android applications
* two interactive touchscreen kiosks

We’ll also look at a website project for BRIC Arts Media, which took a hybrid approach to rendering the website: most of the website is straight-ahead Drupal, but the calendar is a React application that uses JSON data from the CMS.

We’ll touch on: 

* Content strategy and data migrations
* Building a CMS with an API-driven mindset
* Where to put business logic
* How to integrate Drupal into an existing ecosystem
* REST API options (Views vs Custom Modules)