[Research] VA.gov Build Architecture Planning

[mchelen-gov]

Questions to research:

1) How do new products get started using CMS? (context: cms export + transformers) Let's explore this through a separate issue, because PW, Facilities, and CMS teams may already have answered this or are tracking documentation work.

2) Where can the technical architecture of the CMS and va.gov build system be improved?

3) What are the steps towards implementing an improved technical architecture?

Mural: https://app.mural.co/t/departmentofveteransaffairs9999/m/departmentofveteransaffairs9999/1610724368019/556c3432acd08a23b9a761b0fa93605e2806f411

References:

• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-cms/blob/master/READMES/unity.md
• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-cms
• https://tome.fyi/
• https://www.drupal.org/project/tome
• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-team/blob/master/products/platform/cms-metalsmith-build/2019-11-superteam-draft-charter.md
• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-team/issues/5989
• • https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-cms/blob/master/READMES/unity.md
• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-cms
• https://tome.fyi/
• https://www.drupal.org/project/tome
• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-team/blob/master/products/platform/cms-metalsmith-build/2019-11-superteam-draft-charter.md
• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-team/issues/5989
• https://vfs.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/VP/pages/567607297/WIP+CMS+export+transformation+overview#Static-content-build
• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-team/issues/5989
• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-team/issues/16478

[Yuffster-usds]

Doc dump especially useful for question #1:

https://vfs.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/VP/pages/567607297/WIP+CMS+export+transformation+overview

Note: This is a work in progress and subject to change.

[indytechcook]

This is a great effort!

Let's be careful not to reference tome for more than a passing reference. We have made several modifications to how the CMS export works with tome. We will probably eventually be moving away from tome as tome's primary use case is as a static site generator.

[indytechcook]

Two of the higher level ideas I've been considering from the perspective of the CMS.

• A Service Bus design where the CMS sends out events with the json of the updated content and all it's dependencies. Then other services can listen for events and act accordingly. The CMS can send events besides content publishing which would allow use the ability to expand to future (unknown) use cases.
• The CMS generates more (or all) of the HTML for the pages it owns. Since the structure of the templates and data is coupled with the format of the data in the CMS, we can avoid many of the data structure pitfalls in the build by letting the CMS build the HTML. This also allows the CMS to intelligently cache the HTML which will increase performance.