Why Has Decoupled Drupal Been Slow to Adopt?

April 13, 2022

The notion of using Drupal as an API-first CMS has been floating around the community for many years. There’s been a long-standing dream to fully use Drupal as a content platform with a sleek React-based front end. But adoption has been slow—why?

Drupal is a Content Management System (CMS). Although it’s powered by sophisticated code, its core purpose is to support editors—people responsible for creating and managing content, not code. Drupal's editorial tools are robust, and more importantly, customizable. At Chapter Three, we invest heavily in building smart, clean editorial experiences. In fact, we believe that crafting great content administration is just as important—if not more so—than front-end design.

A decoupled Drupal website must give editors real-time control. Traditionally, decoupled Drupal sites failed to offer this. There was always a tradeoff: go decoupled and lose CMS features, or stay coupled and limit front-end freedom. Dries himself noted that decoupled Drupal cannot succeed if editors are left behind.

Until now, all decoupled Drupal solutions have left editors with clunky preview flows and no real-time publishing. Agencies tried everything to make headless work, but repeatedly ran into hard problems.

Chapter Three set out to change that—to create a fully decoupled front-end that content editors actually love. Next.js gave our developers the tools to build the editorial Holy Grail: a fast, modern site with real-time content updates. The result? Next-Drupal.

Next-Drupal bridges Drupal and Next.js, delivering a seamless, real-time editorial experience between your CMS and front end. Drupal provides a powerful JSON:API content layer. Next.js provides blazing-fast page delivery and on-demand Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR). Together, they finally solve the editorial and publishing challenges that have plagued decoupled builds for years. Here are eight awesome reasons to move your Drupal site to Next-Drupal.

"From a technology perspective, headless has always been something that we've been very interested in. We just hadn't found the right project—until now. The thing we're looking at is Next.js and Next-Drupal as well. It looks very sexy and feels like the next thing—literally. We’ll see."
— Ivan Stegic, TEN7

Next-Drupal is the solution we’ve been waiting for—finally making decoupled Drupal sites a business-ready reality.