Combining VEDA UI with Drupal?

[j08lue]

Many NASA Earth science websites are based on Drupal to make it easy for a team of domain expert contributors and comms specialists to manage content with the help of graphical user interfaces and the usual quality of life features CMSes provide.

We are asked to sketch up scenarios of how VEDA UI could be combined with Drupal to get the best of both worlds - familiar and low-tech content management with Drupal and interactive data visualization and integration of live data into prose like storytelling.

See also: https://github.com/NASA-IMPACT/veda-architecture/issues/463#issuecomment-2271075839

Acceptance criteria

• We described, at high level, what kind of integration of VEDA UI and Drupal could be possible and meaningful

[j08lue]

The trajectory we are on with our current VEDA UI refactor is that VEDA UI turns into a React component library plus recommendations and examples (template instance) of how to put them together and feed them with data (dataset information, stories, header/footer/nav, page content).

Is it possible to feed these React components we are currently building with data from a (headless) Drupal CMS? Or would they need to work differently?

In my (superficial) understanding, Drupal CMS UI generates content of some form and stores it in an (SQL) database. Then some software (normally PHP) picks it up from the database and renders it into HTML using some website template.

Based on this, the questions are whether it possible that

1. Drupal UI generates the kind of content that VEDA UI components need?
2. A React app which includes VEDA UI components fetches content from the Drupal-managed content database?
3. This setup actually improves the content editing workflow for key contributors - in particular tightening the loop from content editing to rendering (previewing)?