Princeton Site Builder: Behind the Scenes
summary
Princeton runs 1,000 sites on a Drupal multisite hosted in Acquia Site Factory and maintains 80,000 lines of custom PHP across ~60 modules to support ~250,000 nodes. The platform uses Docker for local dev, Bitbucket Pipelines + a Behat test suite (≈1h15m) and Tugboat QA for PR environments, New Relic for monitoring, and monthly releases with a blue/green-style deployment that updates 500 sites in two days. Custom features include content list blocks, taxonomy reference manager, layout Builder Styles and a bespoke access control model; tradeoffs favor maintainability and automated tests to avoid upgrade regressions.
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chapters (24)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:27Who is WDS
- 2:05What is Site Builder
- 4:15Project Overview
- 6:38Architecture Document
- 8:02Site Building Guide
- 11:00Site Builder Capabilities
- 12:53Custom vs contrib
- 15:28Custom modules
- 16:16Feed blocks
- 19:38Content types
- 22:46Document Library
- 23:27Content List Blocks
- 26:34Taxonomy Reference Manager
- 28:07Layout Builder Styles
- 29:52CK Editor Styles
- 30:49Layout Filter
- 31:48Access Control
- 34:56Content Type Settings
- 38:20Forum Settings
- 39:37Local Development
- 47:50Release Planning
- 55:15Performance Monitoring
- 57:32What would you do differently
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