Angular/React - Where do they fit in?

Question

I would like to start looking into Angular or React, but I'm having a hard time at the minute figuring out where they fit in?

I currently build all our sites using PHP based Expression Engine or Craft CMS. Is it possible to use Angular or React with these? Would I be correct in thinking they act as the whole front-end?

So for example, would I use EE/Craft to just create the API's to fetch/post data, and then Angular/React would generate the pages using the data from these calls?

Answer 1

That is exactly what I would do. I am not overly familiar with the CMS frameworks you are using, but do have a good bit of experience with CMS development. Typically I leverage the provided APIs to bring the data to the presentation layer, and then use a JavaScript framework such as Angular to create my UI.

This approach will work great if you can get away with not using any of the CMS server controls, and perform all data operations through API calls.

Answer 2

Using a CMS for your data as an API is fine, but you might be better off with something custom made (like a rails or nodejs project). CMS's are not ideal if you're are building just an API. Typically, you'd built your React/Angular website as a static website that you can deploy to a hosting provider (like S3 or Github Pages), this gives the immediate benefit of improved security, speed and scalability. From your static React or Angular site you then leverage your server-api's to fetch the data.

However, this only fixes the data problem, not the content management problem. Since you have a static site, there is no way for your content editor or marketers to be able to change the content on your website. Everything has to be done in the source code - by a developer. You can fix this by adding a drop-in content management solution like INSTANT on top of your static website. Without any coding, it allows anyone with an account to change content directly on the website.