Multi-site by design.
A shared Drupal architecture created common foundations while allowing individual publications to retain their own publishing context and experience.
Case study / Singapore Press Holdings
One system.
Many voices.
One standard.
How Growibes engineered a multi-site Drupal architecture that let a major regional media group publish independently without losing the governance, structure and consistency of the platform.
SPH / DIGITAL SYSTEMSingapore · Southeast Asia
Many publications.
One architecture.
One architecture.
A multi-site publishing ecosystem needs two things that often fight each other: local editorial freedom and central control. The architecture has to make both possible.
EDITORIAL
GOVERNANCE
MULTI-SITE
DRUPAL
Architecture / 02
50+Editorial staff managing content independently
Multi-siteShared platform architecture
DrupalEnterprise CMS foundation
GovernedStructured content and editorial control
01 / The pressure
Publishing freedom without platform chaos.
A major regional media organisation has a deceptively hard digital problem: every publication needs to move quickly and behave like its own operation, while the organisation still needs common standards, reusable architecture and central governance.
01
Different teams, different rhythms.
Editorial teams needed tooling that matched the realities of day-to-day publishing rather than developer-dependent workflows.
02
Shared infrastructure, separate identities.
The platform needed to support multiple publications without forcing every property into the same experience.
03
Governance had to disappear into the workflow.
Structured content and permissions needed to make the right behaviour easy rather than adding another layer of administration.
02 / The system
Central nervous system.
Distributed publishing.
The architecture separated the shared platform capabilities from the individual publication experiences. That allowed teams to operate independently while benefiting from common engineering foundations and governance.
Publication AEditorial team
Publication BEditorial team
Publication CEditorial team
Publication DEditorial team
SHARED
DRUPAL
PLATFORM
DRUPAL
PLATFORM
03 / Architecture decisions
Make the platform feel simpler than it is.
Editors first.
Non-technical editor tooling and workflows were treated as a core product requirement, not an administrative afterthought.
Governance through structure.
Structured content and role-aware workflows created consistency at the system level without requiring every editorial decision to pass through engineering.
04 / Evidence
Scale without making editors feel the scale.
The project material documents the size and operating model of the editorial environment. We keep the evidence concrete rather than inventing traffic or business metrics that aren't documented.
50+Editorial staff able to manage content independently
Multi-siteArchitecture supporting multiple teams and publications
StructuredContent governance across the publishing ecosystem
DrupalShared enterprise CMS foundation
05 / What changed
The architecture stopped being something editors had to think about — and became the system that let them publish.
Growibes' role
Multi-site Drupal architecture, editorial workflows, non-technical editor tooling and structured content governance across teams and publications. The engagement demonstrates how Growibes approaches enterprise Drupal when the real challenge is not building another site, but building a platform that multiple organisations inside one organisation can actually use.