How Penn State News Pivoted to Decoupled Drupal with Gatsby DrupalCon Portland 2022

In this session, Mark Shropshire and James Nourse discuss how Penn State News transformed its platform to enhance communication across the university. They describe the pivot to a decoupled and open-source architecture that supports over 25 campus locations and 18 colleges in sharing hundreds of stories daily, while ensuring brand consistency and system security. The talk covers the mobile-first flexible design, the migration from a Drupal 7 content management system to a decoupled architecture using Acquia hosted Drupal and Gatsby Cloud, and the implementation of Drupal API endpoints. Additionally, the speakers highlight advancements in SEO strategy and the migration of the Headlines email system, which distributes 30 million individual emails per year, demonstrating the platform's scalability and cost predictability.