Building a publishing platform for 15 brands

Ishan Mahajan

The session will start, with a brief case study on the digital journey of a publishing company, which chose Drupal 8 to build its new publishing platform. I'll take you through the journey of migrating 15 brands, very much used to (for a very very long time) running their independent sites, onto this new common Drupal 8 platform.

Challenge:

How will a single Drupal core (distribution) cater to 15 different brands, each having its own identify and workflows
How not to bloat the platform with features needed by only a single brand...that is not a platform

Solution:

After weeks of hard work, came up with a set of "Core Platform Features" that meet 80% of each brand's needs.
Provide configurations and tools that enable brands to take care of the remaining 20%.
What is the remaining 20% brand level work?
Theme
Layouts and Templates
Taxonomies
AD rules
Roles and Permissions

Demo:

Bulk of the session will be a demo of the platform.

We dive deep into the set of Drupal 8 features and modules that allowed us to build a core platform, which lets each brand setup and customization their unique sites.

I'll walk give a demo of the essential Drupal 8 modules and APIs we used:

Paragraphs
Panelizer
Block API
Layouts

As we go through the demo, we'll see how 2 very unique looking sites are created, using the site building capabilities provided by the core platform.

After the demo, we'll close the session with a brief mention of other key aspects of the platform:

Infrastructure: multi site setup in Drupal 8
Styleguide: how using patternlab, helped us update the theme for each site quickly

Drupal is a registered trademark of Dries Buytaert.