The Conservative Party

This project revolves around a large number of reasonably simple Drupal websites that all sit on the same platform maximising the use of Drupal's multisite functionality. This means that whilst each website is distinct in terms of look and feel and the data that drives it, every website on the platform sits on the same codebase - making it easy to apply changes/fixes across every website that sits on the platform. In order to manage the provision of these websites we use a customised version of Aegir. Aegir is a Drupal provisioning tool that allows us to manage multiple Drupal websites from one place. We use these tools to kick off the initial build of a new website and poke some very basic configuration data through to the site at this stage - the result being an empty, branded Drupal website that can then be handed over to the client for content population. When the time comes to update the platform, Aegir is clever enough to sanity check a migration from one platform to another to make sure that update patches are applied properly and everything runs as expected. If not it'll automatically revert to the last stable platform. This means that websites remain highly available during the update process. Conveniently we can also use Aegir to take regular backups of each website it manages so we can easily recover data in the event of something unexpected happening. ComputerMinds have been heavily involved in the development of the open source Aegir platform from an early stage so we really understand how this powerful tool can be used for maximum gain, as this project shows!