Table of Contents Drupal’s many challenges today Drupal’s incompatibility with Node.js server-side rendering Drupal is losing market share and mindshare Decoupled Drupal isn’t always the answer Motivating Web Components in Drupal What are Web Components? Implementing "poor man's components" What is not a component? Conclusion --- The question of where Drupal’s front end is headed has led to much handwringing in the community, with a variety of ongoing discussions about whether decoupled Drupal (the subject of a recently released book and a yearly conference in New York City) is the future for Drupal’s presentation layer. Out of all the debates in the community, few have engendered as much consternation and spilled ink as how, when, and whether to replace or augment Twig’s functionality as the default theme engine for Drupal. The discussion raises many passions, because so many front-end developers have committed themselves to maintaining Twig themes and to monolithic Drupal architectures. At DrupalCon Amsterdam, Fabian Franz (Senior Technical Architect and Performance Lead at Tag1 Consulting) presented a fascinating and futuristic session about the potential directions that Drupal’s front end could take. In Fabian’s conception of a prospective presentation layer for Drupal, gone are the critiques of Drupal as...