Architecture, code Vision

Rebuilding a Drupal portal from scratch takes months before it starts delivering value, and it concentrates all the risk into a single night’s release. At DrupalCamp Italy 2026 Adriano Cori presented the alternative we apply with the Strangler Fig Pattern, an incremental replacement in which the new Next.js frontend runs alongside Drupal on the same domain and replaces its theme one family of pages at a time. Each family of pages can be switched back to Drupal with a configuration change.

He also showed the limits of the method and the cases where decoupling is not needed. The Page Delivery modules, which we use to apply it, have been open source on drupal.org since 22 October 2026.

The Insight ‘Migrazione incrementale con Strangler Fig Pattern: disaccoppiare Drupal senza fermare il business’ explains how the coexistence works and which checks come before each family of pages is moved.

A portal that was accessible at acceptance testing can stop being accessible within a few releases. Today whoever runs a portal has to be able to show that it is accessible: public bodies in Italy under the Stanca Law, and many private digital services under the European Accessibility Act.

At DrupalCamp Italy 2026 Roberto Mariani presented a Proof of Concept (PoC), that is, a working prototype of Accessibility-as-Code. It consists of automated accessibility checks inside the development pipeline of a test Drupal portal with a logged-in area. He also explained what automation does not find, which is why manual audits and testing with people with disabilities are still needed. We are bringing Accessibility-as-Code into our own production workflow, which is a more complex job than a PoC.

The Insight ‘Accessibility in the pipeline, before the merge’ describes the PoC and offers seven questions to help you work out where to start on your own portal.