British Council

A common foundation for country websites

The British Council needed to support a network of country websites with a shared technical foundation. The common Drupal 7 distribution brought that work together: improvements to the platform could serve multiple sites, while each country retained its own content.

This case study focuses on the country-site platform within my British Council engagements from 2012 to 2019. In my December 2015 account of the work, the distribution supported more than 120 sites.

My contribution through Artetecha

Working through Artetecha Ltd with the British Council’s internal team, I helped design and develop the distribution and improve engineering and deployment practices. This was a collaborative platform project, with my contribution centred on software engineering, architecture, and delivery.

One major change was the move from a shared multisite deployment on bare-metal infrastructure to individual site environments on Platform.sh. The common distribution became a dependency of each site, giving the team a more flexible way to release and operate the network.

The work behind the pages

The country websites were the visible part of a larger engineering task: maintaining a common platform, coordinating changes, and making deployments manageable across a large network. That experience informs how I approach multilingual sites and projects that need to grow without becoming difficult to maintain.

This describes the historical platform and my contribution during those engagements. The British Council’s current websites have continued to evolve.

I wrote about the migration at the time in Migrating to Platform.sh with success.