Headless Drupal CMS for PZPN

The Polish Football Association operates Football Connects Us, the PZPN Library, and From the Backyard to the Stadium for fans, journalists, and youth football audiences. Editors also enrich match records from the Extranet System, where coaches and referees log results, lineups, and events. All public sites query a shared Apache NiFi data bus rather than Drupal directly; a dedicated API layer routes bus data to each frontend.

The client

PZPN is Poland's largest sports association, coordinating elite and grassroots football nationwide. Its digital channels reach millions of fans worldwide through articles, videos, live streams, and a historical archive unique in global football. The digital team needed one editorial backend for multiple brands without duplicating match data entry.

Challenge

The platform faced several interconnected problems:

• Legacy CMS installations could not handle weekend spikes when thousands of matches generate twice as many new data records.
• Football Connects Us, the PZPN Library, and From the Backyard to the Stadium required distinct content models but shared match and player metadata.
• Editors needed to enrich Extranet System data with photos and long-form descriptions without re-entering statistics already stored on the data bus.
• The CMS had to push and pull data through the NiFi bus so frontends and internal systems stayed synchronized.
• Match article workflows required player lists filtered to athletes who actually participated in a given game, not the full national database.

Solutions

Discovery workshops and data architecture

Workshops with PZPN editors and IT teams mapped how match data flows from the Extranet System through NiFi to public websites. The headless CMS was planned as a bus supplier and consumer: editors read match entities from the bus, attach media and narrative content in Drupal, and publish structured payloads back for API consumers.

Headless Drupal backend with component-based content

The implementation separates Drupal from all public frontends. Editors log into one backend and see only the content types and websites assigned to their role. Most article types assemble from reusable Paragraph components tailored to each property, with order and configuration controlled from the admin UI.

Match-aware editorial components

Custom content types for match descriptions bind to bus-fed match entities. When editors describe lineups minute by minute, player reference fields filter to participants in that match, eliminating manual searches across thousands of athlete records.

API documentation and editor onboarding

The project delivered API documentation for frontend and integration teams connecting to NiFi endpoints. Hands-on editor training and ongoing support helped editorial staff adopt the component model across parallel Agile sprints.

Result

The headless CMS now feeds three public websites and internal PZPN systems from one Drupal installation. Editors enrich Extranet match data with photos and descriptions, publish standalone articles for Football Connects Us, and produce metadata consumed only by internal tools. The architecture supports adding new frontends without restructuring the content model.

Examples of implemented features:

• Headless Drupal CMS supplying Football Connects Us, PZPN Library, and From the Backyard to the Stadium through the NiFi data bus.
• Component-based paragraph types scoped per website and editor role.
• Match-linked player fields filtered to game participants only.
• Extranet data enrichment workflow with photos and long-form descriptions.
• API documentation for teams building frontends and integrations.
• Agile delivery with multi-team coordination during peak release periods.