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Category: Internet / TechTags: Drupal

Besides the more obvious reasons of having more sites to work with and more assets to leverage managing multiple Drupal sites can be beneficial for a number of reasons.

It forces you to make things open, scalable and dynamic for all sites.

If you are running multiple Drupal sites it really forces you to clean up your code a lot and do a lot less hacking. It is much harder to get away with simply doing some quick fix that will only work one time for a custom site. This is because more than likely you will want to use this same feature on another site. And rather than going through and writing another custom module for this other site it makes much more sense to figure out a more scalable approach that fits more than just one site now. This is something that I have had happen multiple times with my sites and it really does force me to build much nicer modules that include a number of features for different sites requiring different things. The modules become much more dynamic and complete.

It helps you create more features

Because of the nature of running sites that may be a bit different in some areas, it helps you create more features for your modules and themes that you probably would not have thought about otherwise.

Same codebase allows things to get done much quicker

The first Drupal site may take a little bit of time and thought configuring and getting the ball rolling, but each site after that seems to get quicker and quicker to complete. After all they should. Once you have everything built out and figured out it is usually pretty easy to do the same thing over again with just a different theme. All the modules and everything are the same, and if everything is built out to where it can be scaled onto other sites then this can happen extremely quick.

Like just the other day I was setting up a blog for my brother and it was seriously set up in less than 10 minutes. I grabbed a domain name, changed the nameservers, threw it on my server and then enabled some of the modules that I already had on the main Drupal install. This type of speed is so amazing and special.

Updates happen on all the sites

Every time you update something it will happen across the whole network of sites. This is extremely useful as pretty much everything that is updated should happen on all the sites. And it would be so challenging and confusing to have to go through each site and figure out if these changes have been made or not. It makes much more sense to have every site using the exact same files. And then once you have something that you have decided is worth updating all you have to do is make that change and allow every site in your network to now benefit from the change. You are pretty much multiplying your work every time you make positive changes on your sites.

What I'm trying to say is...

I love Drupal!