What does a major media company do when they want to manage media content with Drupal but serve a REST API to thousands of users across desktop sites, mobile phones, and set top boxes? They could wait for Drupal 8, or do one better and take a Decoupled CMS route.

"Decoupled Content Management Systems" are all the rage these days. In theory, by separating the various parts of a CMS platform into separate pieces a site can scale, grow, and evolve more freely. Of course, that's quite different than how most open source CMS platforms are built today. That doesn’t mean they can’t be used that way, however.

This session will look at how Palantir.net paired up Drupal 7 with Elastic Search and Silex, a Symfony-based microframework that is well suited to lightweight web service APIs, to build a robust and scalable media metadata system.

The result was a redundant, multi-server, multi-application distribution platform integrating with no less than four 3rd party systems, including Rotten Tomatoes. Once it hit production the performance was superb thanks to its decoupled approach and smart use of HTTP; the system is far faster and more secure than had it been built with just Drupal 7 alone. This was also Palantir.net’s first “fully Agile” project, which also contributed to its success as the client’s contracting partners changed their minds throughout the course of the project.

The decoupled CMS approach has a lot going for it, and the advances made in Drupal 8 will make that even more viable. There’s no need to wait, however. High-performance web services with Drupal are ready today.

Slides here: http://www.palantir.net/presentations/dcamsterdam2014-decoupled-drupal-s...