Need to launch and maintain lots of similar Drupal sites? We can help!

You can save TONS of time and money by creating a “Drupal distribution.”

Don’t know how to get started, stuck on a hard problem or just want someone to do it for you?

Get help from the experts!
“Hey, what’s a ‘Drupal distribution’?”

Maintaining lots of Drupal sites can be painful!

If you work at a: 

  • University

  • Government

  • Non-profit

  • Startup

… and need to launch and maintain dozens (or even HUNDREDS) of Drupal sites, then you know it can be painful!

Every time you launch a new site, you need to do the same configuration, display the same branding and include some shared functionality. Cloning a “golden site” that’s just the way you want it can help with launching new sites.

But what happens when you need to make changes to the configuration, branding or shared functionality across all sites? Or even just apply a security update?

Creating a Drupal distribution can drastically reduce the time and money required to launch new sites AND allow you to make updates to all sites at once when you need to!

But the tips, tricks and best practices for distributions aren’t necessarily already known on your Drupal team. If you don’t know how to get started, are stuck on a hard problem or just want someone to do it for you… then we can help!

UC Berkeley saved money while improving the quality of campus sites!

Video created by the Open Berkeley team to promote it internally.

UC Berkeley has hundreds of campus websites, including sites for its departments and their initiatives. All sites need to have consist branding and (like all Drupal sites) need to be updated for bug fixes and security advisories. But budgets are tight and not all departments have staff with technical skills!

That’s why the Central IT department created Open Berkeley, a Drupal distribution that any campus department can choose to use for their new site.

Users get a site that follows brand guidelines out-of-the-box, meets accessibility requirements and has the basic functionality that most UC Berkeley sites need. And this allows Central IT to continue to develop the distribution and regularly release new versions to their users with new features, bug fixes and security updates.

And since all sites get to benefit from the work that Central IT is doing, the cost is shared across the whole university, rather than requiring the departments that own the site bare the full cost!

Learn how we helped take Open Berkeley to the next level!

We can help you by...

  • Converting your "golden site" into a re-usable, easy-to-maintain Drupal distribution

  • Auditing your existing Drupal distribution and helping you to make the most important improvements
  • Training your team on best practices and the more difficult areas of distribution maintenance

  • Consulting with your team, solving hard problems and coding the trickiest parts - whatever help your team needs to succeed!

See all our consulting products and services!

Who are we?

Photo of David Snopek

David Snopek, CTO



David Snopek is a long time Drupal developer, Open Source contributor, and expert in Drupal distributions.

Among the 20 or so Drupal projects that he maintains on Drupal.org (see his profile), he's one of the co-maintainers of Panopoly, the most popular "base distribution" and toolkit for creating Drupal distributions.

Beyond Panopoly, he also co-organizes Drupal414, the Milwaukee Drupal users group, and presents at many Drupal events every year, including DrupalCon. Check out his presentation on Panopoly at DrupalCon Austin 2014!

Latest blog post

Higher Ed on Drupal? You should create a distribution!

Submitted by David Snopek on April 28, 2015 - 2:16pm

Higher Ed is moving to Drupal in a big way! Many universities are even standardizing on Drupal, and using it build all their new sites.

It's a great fit, solving many of the common problems that universities and colleges have worldwide, including: easy access control, editorial workflows, accessibility, brand consistency and lower costs compared to non-Open Source platforms.

Using a single platform for multiple sites, whatever it is, allows you to gain a number of efficiencies:

  • Standard tools, techniques, and configurations
  • Shared knowledge in the organization (training creating content on one site will transfer to another site)

But if you're using Drupal for more than a couple sites at your organization, and you don't have a custom Drupal distribution, then YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!

Creating a Drupal distribution will allow you to:

  • Launch a new site in seconds (instead of minutes or hours), with your standard branding and the all the base functionality you want on every site
  • Reduce the cost of maintaining shared functionality on many sites, by allowing you to update the distribution and quickly deploy the same changes to all your sites
  • Easily apply security updates
  • Share the cost of developing new features that will benefit many campus sites

Read more to learn how many institutions of higher education are creating Drupal distributions to increase efficiency and reduce costs when maintaining lots and lots of Drupal sites!

Read more articles on our blog!