Architecture Overview

What do we mean when use the term architecture at Grief Matters?

Architecture is the set of conventions, structure and design choices, that make your path forward as a contributing developer intuitive.

Good architecture should act as a guide, so you spend less time finding your way, and more time building.

Guiding Principles

Our architecture serves as a guide, not a diktat. If you identify something that’s not working, is confusing, or just slowing you down, let someone know. Propose a change!

If you do propose a change, make sure it aligns to our guiding principles:

1. Break out when not if

We introduce new abstractions and extract code when things get difficult, not if they might be in the future.

2. Simplicity! Forever and Always!

If there is a simple solution to a specific problem, choose it!

3. It’s Just Text

Sometimes we have ideas that start out great enough but become really painful when scaled or when something else changes. Don’t be precious - it’s just text. We can always write more.

But that’s closely related to…

4. If It Aint Broke

There’s simply no motivation to change something if it’s a solved problem for us and working well. If that wheel is already invented - leave it rolling.

CMS vs. Website: What Goes Where?

One of the core objectives of a headless CMS is to decouple content from presentation. A good way to explain this is that the CMS should only ever define what should be presented; and never how it should be presented.

In reality, this can be hard to reason, and the distinction between the two blurry. A good working example is how we’ve defined ‘Core Content Groups’ for use in the top-level navigation of the site. Whilst we know in advance the primary purpose is to create site navigation, we’ve tried to model the content in a way that it could be used elsewhere if needed.

In a nutshell, if you find yourself having to introduce or reshape content in the website project, then its likely better done through new or changed content types in the CMS. On the flip-side, you should never find yourself creating things in the CMS like “Fancy Heading” or “Left Aligned Paragraph”.