UChicago Biological Sciences
Enterprise Drupal Platform: Multi-site Architecture · Centralized Content Services · Identity Integration
Engineered and maintained a large-scale Drupal multi-site platform supporting dozens of institutional properties, introducing a centralized content service layer and sustaining the system through multiple major platform upgrades.
- Role:
- Lead Engineer
- Employer:
- IfThen
- Client:
- University of Chicago
- Team:
- 4 developers, ~20+ stakeholders
- Industry:
- Higher Education
- Timeline:
- 4 mo build, 8 yr maint (2018 - 2026)
Impact
- Enabled scalable support for dozens of BSD sites through a shared platform architecture
- Centralized faculty, publication, and event data across the ecosystem
- Reduced duplicate content creation and improved data consistency across sites
- Aligned authentication and authorization with institutional identity systems
- Sustained platform reliability through multiple major Drupal upgrades
My Role
- Led platform architecture and long-term technical direction
- Developed custom Drupal modules for platform and institutional needs
- Contributed to frontend component system and theme architecture
- Owned major-version upgrade strategy and execution
- Maintained deployment workflows and operational tooling
Technical Architecture
Implemented as a shared multi-site Drupal platform with a centralized content repository, enabling API-driven content distribution and integration with institutional identity systems.
System Overview
- Shared Drupal codebase supporting many independent site instances
- Central Data Repository (CDR) for ingesting and distributing institutional faculty, publication, and event data
- Producer/consumer API layer for cross-site content consumption
- LDAP authentication with Grouper-based role mapping
- Component-driven frontend architecture using Paragraphs, Twig, and Vue.js to support structured authoring and reuse
- Custom Drupal modules supporting platform-specific functionality
- Shared codebase with site-specific configuration and independent databases
- Acquia hosted infrastructure with environment-specific configuration
- CloudFront CDN for optimized media delivery
- CI/CD pipeline via Jenkins and Composer with Acquia deployment workflows
Architectural Decisions
- Adopted multi-site platform model to balance shared engineering with site-level flexibility
- Introduced CDR as a centralized content service to eliminate duplication
- Used API-driven distribution to decouple content ingestion from presentation
- Integrated LDAP and Grouper to align with institutional identity systems
This approach enabled consistent data governance while preserving flexibility across independently managed sites.
Stack
Frontend
Backend
Infrastructure
Context
The Biological Sciences Division required a scalable web platform capable of supporting a wide range of departments, programs, and institutional units. Existing approaches led to duplicated content, inconsistent data, and fragmented site management.
Key challenges included:
- Repeated manual entry of faculty, publication, and event data
- Lack of a centralized source of truth for institutional content
- Disconnected site implementations with inconsistent structure
- Authentication and access control outside institutional identity systems
- The objective was to unify site delivery under a shared platform while centralizing data and aligning with university infrastructure.
Outcome
The platform enabled consistent data distribution, scalable site management, and alignment with institutional identity systems. It was successfully modernized across multiple major Drupal versions while continuing to support a large and active ecosystem of sites.