Open source technologies and Drupal does save an organization money in licensing fees. However, how do you truly save hundreds of thousands of dollars in website development costs at the enterprise-level? Perhaps one way is to build the main website and extract a light-weight enterprise-specific Drupal baseline out of it. That is exactly what our team did in the last 10 months.

Since making this common Drupal baseline available to other parts of the organization, our team has helped migrate 7 component sites that receive millions of hits per month. These sites were built and relaunched within months and at a fraction of the cost. Currently, 10 more sites are in various stages of development and will go live in the next few months.

Our Drupal baseline solution has a base profile which is common among all sites in the platform and adds a component-specific subprofile that is used to customize the component sites.

In this session, we'll cover topics including:

• How the common Drupal baseline was developed
• How we standardize organization-specific features in the base profile
• How we allow the component sites to customize in the subprofile
• How we build the sites using make files and install files
• How we integrate with certain external services to help with operations and maintenance
• How we setup the update process for core and contributed modules
• How the common Drupal baseline cuts our cost to build and cuts our schedule to launch