Drupal Multisite Governance Template for Universities

This template gives you the working documents for governing a multi-college Drupal platform: role definitions with duties and escalation paths, a permissions matrix mapped to Drupal core and Content Moderation permissions, a content publishing workflow, a brand-component review cycle, a per-site launch checklist, and a quarterly content audit. Sixteen pages, eight sections, ready to adapt to your institution.
It is built for the split most universities need: centralize the platform and brand layers, delegate content and editorial to the colleges, and enforce that split in deployed configuration rather than in a policy document.

What Does the Governance Model Look Like?

Preview, so you know what you are downloading.

The four layers

The enforcement rule the template is built on: permission overrides happen at the code level, through configuration deployed with the codebase, not through an admin screen. A governance rule that a site admin can change in the UI is a request, not a rule.

The four questions in the decision checklist:

1. Do your colleges need separate editors, but not separate databases, languages, or compliance regimes?
2. Does any campus need to deviate from the compliance regime, language set, or data location?
3. Does anyone own the platform layer today?
4. Are you maintaining more than a handful of independent codebases?

Who Is This Template For?

It is written for the person accountable for the platform layer: central web, digital, or IT leadership at a university running a dozen or more college and campus properties. It assumes you already have the problem, so it skips the case for consolidation and goes straight to the artifacts.

It is useful if you are choosing a separation model, consolidating independent college sites, writing a governance policy that has to hold, or preparing for the ADA Title II compliance dates.

It is not a strategy deck and it is not a Drupal tutorial.

Why Is Governance an Architecture Problem?

University web governance is usually treated as a policy problem, solved with a committee and a brand book. It is an enforcement problem. Every rule that is not backed by the separation model, meaning a shared codebase, a cascading theme, and code-level permission configuration, eventually gets negotiated away one college exception at a time.

That is why this template pairs the role definitions with a permissions matrix and a workflow. The roles are the policy. The permissions are what make the policy real.