100 Sites, 6 Multisites, 12 Years: Lessons from an Enterprise CMS Engagement

Twelve years into a single enterprise engagement, you stop optimizing for launches and start optimizing for survival. Ndevr has supported a global media organization's ~100-site, multi-multisite footprint across departments — each with its own editors, content models, plugin and module preferences, and political gravity. This session walks through what we wish we had known on day one: how to design a multisite architecture that survives staff turnover, how to keep a content estate upgradable when half the sites think they're snowflakes, and how to triage the technical debt that inevitably accumulates when "temporary" decisions outlive the people who made them. We'll cover concrete patterns that worked (centralized base profiles, codified editorial governance, controlled module/plugin allowlists) and the ones that didn't (over-flexible content types, "we'll deprecate later"). Attendees will leave with a checklist for evaluating their own multisite stability, a framework for prioritizing stabilization work, and an honest read on what an agency actually does in year 5, year 10, and year 12 of an engagement when the original team is gone and the platform must keep running.