Skip to main content

An interesting integration issue that came up with a client with a Drupal site hosted on Plausible.io with a Gatsby module that tied into Github code which triggered a Vercel deployment into an integrated flat site with 3rd party code.

Drupal is a PHP-based content management server. 

Plausible.io is a javascript-based site-tracking module that (in this case) is managed by npm

Gastby is designed to take an entire Drupal site, flatten it into a node.js implementation. and then package it for delivery. In this case it too was managed by npm

Vercel is a web hosting platform that uses site deployment CI processes that can be triggered by git pushes

Pantheon is a drupal-hosting platform that has an incredible DEV-TEST-PROD and deployment processes that can be triggered via a website or via config files managed by git 

Adding new pages, instead of using Drupal normally as a CMS with content, blocks, themes and menus all tied together, was much more complex with the Drupal site only being used as a database for the content. The themes, links, footers, headers, etc were all programmed in Gatsby. Each new page, instead of being as simple as clicking the "create content" button also involved programming a gatsby .js file and committing to a git repo. Extremely complex in setup particularly because of the 3rd party libraries needing to be added for each build.

Gatsby documentation indicated that the advantage of using the <link> syntax instead of <a href> syntax is superior speed and decreased bandwidth. However the "delay" that is supposed to go away with using the <link> syntax was still there. Investigation found that the site was nearly completely flat, so there was no advantage to <link> vs just using a flat site with browser cache.

Created staging github branch tied to a new DNS staging preview so client could push code and test prior to merging to production site.

Discovered and fixed security issues

Modified Gatsby code/deployment to add new functionality.