Decoupling Poets.org with Drupal 8 and Vue.js

In our modern digital world we need to distribute content across a huge variety of devices and applications with diverse requirements. But how do you transform a successful Drupal 7 site into a CMS platform capable of serving content equally well to your Oculus Rift, Amazon Echo, Apple Watch, and whatever new device might exist next year?

For Poets.org, the stakes to answering this question were high. With millions of monthly page views and a ranking in the top 20,000 global sites, Poets.org is one of the premier international sources for contemporary and historical poetry. However, their legacy Drupal 7 site was preventing them from achieving key strategic goals.

In this presentation we'll show how Tandem created the new Poets.org, using Drupal 8 to serve content to a Vue.JS frontend. Along the way, we'll discuss…
 

• Using Storybook to create a dynamic style guide.

• How mock API data allowed us to build a Vue.JS prototype that became our production application.

• Designing API-friendly data models in Drupal 8.

• Migrating over 500K pieces of content from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.

• Integrating with Alexa, a cross-platform mobile app built in Ionic, and other services.

• Advantages and challenges of using Drupal 8 with Vue.js

We'll also talk about why we recommended a decoupled Drupal 8 architecture and how this approach has allowed Poets to cut the cost of re-designs, create more integrations with new devices, and optimize user experience across all channels to meet their strategic goals.