React

This presentation looks at how you can build a web application that sources content from Drupal, renders ultra-fast static pages with Gatsby, then combines that with traditional React for optionally adding user authentication and personalization.

With the powerful web APIs it has become relatively easy to create decoupled applications with Drupal 8 as a backend. A number of lighthouse applications have been created and powerful demo systems and starterkits such as 'Reservoir' und 'Contenta' have emerged.

Usually decoupled applications are used to display content, but editing of content still takes place in the backend.

Drupal needs a modern UI for rich content creation. This fall WordPress 5 is out with the brand new Gutenberg editor, a decoupled React based editing experience. It works great! And: It's open source, so we ported it to Drupal. Combining Drupal and Gutenberg is a killer combination, empowering content authors to build rich landing pages inside a rock solid CMS framework.

The frontend ecosystem and especially the React community is very large and confusing to new developers. This workshop aims to provide a gentle introduction to developers used to the traditional Drupal theming approach how they might use React in the wild today.

It will be a very practical step-by-step coding guide with explanations (where needed) how a simple decoupled client can be built from scratch.