How Penn State News Pivoted to Decoupled Drupal with Gatsby  DrupalCon Portland 2022
Channel: Drupal Association
Date: 2022-04-30

Speakers: Mark Shropshire and James Nourse 

Penn State News is more than just a news site. As one of the university’s most visible communications platforms, the site builds togetherness for the university campus, is an informational go-to during campus emergencies, and drives strategic communications. With so many stories to share, Penn State needed a platform that scaled and was highly performant.

In this session, learn how Penn State News pivoted to a decoupled and open-source architecture, empowering their over 25 campus locations and 18 colleges in sharing hundreds of stories daily, while maintaining a consistent brand with a reliable, secure, and expandable platform They created a platform that can be leveraged across the university for years to come by completing the objectives for the project, which includes:

* Designing for mobile-first flexible design system utilizing a component-based approach
* Rebuilding the Drupal 7 content management and publishing system to utilize a decoupled architecture, leveraging Acquia hosted Drupal and a Gatsby Cloud frontend
* Providing Drupal API endpoints that can expose content to the Gatsby frontend and more than 20 campus locations across the University
* Advancing the university’s SEO strategy and driving measurable change to acquisition, reach, and engagement of readers
* Migrating and improving on the Headlines email system, which sends 30 million individual emails per year
* Building a platform that can scale with cost predictability