Reworking the front-end


As of now, the OFDb uses a decoupled Drupal setup, meaning that users and content is managed by Drupal, while the front-end “connects” to it in order to fetch and display the content. This provides a high amount of flexibility.

However, I decided to completely rewrite the front-end and implement it with Drupal as well. This has mainly two reasons:

  1. I chose to create a decoupled instance as a personal learning project to boost my JavaScript and decoupled Drupal skills. In addition, an open movie database should be accessible by an API anyway, since you might want to create mobile apps using the data, for example. Realising that the front-end grows more and more complex with additional features to be implemented, I somewhat lack the time to keep up my JavaScript knowledge. Using solely Drupal, HTML, CSS and some limited JavaScript will allow me to keep maintaining the growing project.
  2. On top of that, I’m not very fond of the “JavaScriptification” of the web. Many Websites are full web apps, where JavaScript is way more dominant than it used to be. In all honesty, I sometimes miss the simplicity of the “good old days”. But here we are, and we can’t turn back anymore.

As of now, I can’t say when the new front-end will be live. I maintain the OFDb in my free time, while having a full time job. I can say that I’ve done already a fair amount of work, but there is still more to be done. To be specific, I’m still working on “converting” the page search and the movie/TV show filters from plain JavaScript to Drupal. After that, and some more testing and bug fixing, the front-end should be deployed.


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