architecture

In the previous post in this series, I described how we rebuilt our page templates with Layout Builder. I ended that post by mentioning that templates are less suitable when the page hierarchy must be derived from the data itself.

To explain that part of the rebuild, it helps to look at a more basic change. In the Drupal 7 site, an imported data object and the page that presented it were the same node, whereas the rebuilt site stores them as separate entities.

In the previous post in this series, I described how we migrated existing page elements from Panels to Layout Builder.

Pages on this site are assembled from configurable page elements implemented as block plugins. These elements display data managed by an external system. Drupal stores their arrangement and configuration, but not the underlying data.

In the previous post, I described why we chose Layout Builder and how Layout Builder IPE restored the frontend editing workflow we had used with Panels IPE.

With the editing workflow in place, we still had to rebuild the elements that editors placed on their pages.

Back in 2022, we upgraded an existing brochure-style site from Drupal 7. The project has been running in different forms for many years and has accumulated a few architectural ideas that worked well, as well as others that needed reconsideration.

This is the first in a series of posts about things I learned while rebuilding and further developing that site.

Most of the information displayed on the site comes from external data sources. Instead of writing and formatting narrative content, editors select from a library of data-driven widgets. These display maps, charts, lists or key figures and provide a limited set of configuration options.