CASE STUDY
Outrider
The Outrider foundation supports multimedia storytelling about nuclear threats and climate change The Outrider website provides readers with a wide variety of content and rich media regarding difficult issues facing humanity. It blends interactive content with regularly published articles and press releases.
CHALLENGE
Extended and modify a statically compiled site employing a headless CMS backend to allow for the regular publishing of content.
The Outrider site was originally designed to pull relatively static data from a headless Drupal installation, compile this data into JSON files, and have GraphQL feed this data into React to build the frontend. This site architecture is referred to as the “JAMStack” – refering to JavaScript, API, and Markup. It’s strength is producing extremely fast and highly performant websites and web apps. The drawback is that it is less tailored for regularly publishing content such as articles and blog posts. While evolving their content marketing strategy Outrider decided that it would be beneficial to begin regularly publishing a variety of new content types on the site including articles, projects, press releases, and fellowships.
SOLUTION
Leverage both the flexibility of Drupal as a headless CMS and the performance of statically compiled sites.
Drupal is a PHP based CMS that natively supports creating custom content types with custom field structures. This makes it perfect for quickly creating new content types that can be consumed by GraphQL and made available to React. While the site was initially set up to display a limited number of content types that would not be updated on a regular basis we created a variety of new content types with a new set of corresponding templates and components to display these content types. We also took advantage of Drupal’s tag system to create article topic landing pages. The ease of accessing data from GraphQL from React allowed us to drop in pieces of this new dynamic content all across the site, enriching the user’s experience and keeping them engaged with content published by Outrider.
RESULTS
Our strategy of progressively adding new content types specifically tailored for Outrider’s evolving content strategy allowed the site to grow in terms of size and information available. We expanded the variety of content on the site to Outrider’s specifications while maintaining the performance of a statically compiled site.
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