Making the major technical decisions about how the Drupal site will work, including determining the theming system, designing the content types and taxonomy terms, and making other design decisions.
Learning/improvement resources: 

Chapter 2. Planning Your Site in the Drupal User Guide

Demonstrated by: 

A Skilled site architect should be able to do the following for a small-to-medium relatively simple site:

  • Work with the product manager or other client representative to inventory the functionality of the site
  • Choose the major Drupal modules that will be required
  • Choose the theming system
  • Determine special permissions needs that might necessitate modules like Groups or Organic Groups
  • Inventory interactive features (like e-commerce or forums) and choose modules to implement them
  • Design the content types and taxonomy vocabularies needed, determining fields, field types, and defaults
  • Work with the product manager or other client representative to determine the need for editorial workflow and design the UI for site editors and maintainers
  • Determine the roles and permissions needed
  • Determine how media (images and other static files) will be stored, along with relevant metadata
  • If replacing an existing site (Drupal or non-Drupal), determine a migration methodology
  • Make other major technical design decisions
  • Work with the implementation team to review the progress of development and make adjustments as needed

An Expert site architect should additionally be able to do the same tasks for a large, complex site or a group of sites that will share the same code. In addition, you should be able to:

  • Plan an implementation for multilingual or multiregional sites
  • Use Drupal Multisite for large numbers of similar sites
  • Determine whether Domain Access is an appropriate implementation for affiliated sites from one Drupal installation and a single shared database
  • Design headless Drupal implementations
  • Design APIs and web services

Roles and Tasks that may use this skill

DrupalCamp speaker (Contributor role)
Make a presentation at a DrupalCamp or DrupalCon event
Duration: 1 hour