MicroDrupal: a new generation web site factory under Drupal 8
Drupal is a solution that offers us several possible architectures to industrialize the production of websites. Until now, we had Domain Access, Organic Group and the multi-site architecture native to Drupal. To have a relatively exhaustive slide show of the different solutions at our disposal, you can refer to this Industrialization and multi-site with Drupal blog post.
The native multi-site at drupal 8 is a proven and robust approach. Based on an installation profile, we can quickly generate similar pre-configured and ready to use sites. But this architecture can have 3 major disadvantages:
- As time goes by, sites initially generated on the basis of the same profile will tend to diverge more and more making their maintenance more and more delicate. And the fact that each site is an independent site can only accelerate this natural trend.
- Generating a Drupal 8 instance to create a simple website (e. g. a brand website, a landing page for a one-time event) can look like taking out the jackhammer to drive in a nail.
- Some organizations may have a certain latency when several actors have to intervene at the infrastructure level to prepare the generation of an instance on a site plant, reducing to zero one of the advantages of a site plant: the time to market or the possibility of generating a site in a few minutes ready for use.
MicroDrupal is a new industrialization solution available with Drupal 8 that wants to address these few points, not by relying, like the existing solutions, on the configuration of Drupal 8 but on the content itself.
What if you could create a website as easily as you publish a blog post on your site?
It is this challenge that MicroDrupal is meeting by using a new architecture proposed by the Micro Site contributed module. Similar to the Domain Access module, however, this architecture allows a better separation and isolation of each site powered by a master instance, just as it allows the creation of a site instance to be delegated to a content manager. We can then benefit from all the power and modularity of Drupal to design different types of sites, and integrate the different modules of the Drupal ecosystem into the context of each micro site.
And since each site powered by a MicroDrupal-based instance is nothing more or less than content, their management and maintenance can be very simple. MicroDrupal allows you to create and manage multiple different sites in a simple and natural way within the same Drupal instance, which could be your institutional site. Once the base core is in place, the rest is just a little bit of site building and theming.
If you would like more information about MicroDrupal and its architecture, please do not hesitate to contact us.