Headless Magnolia multisite platform for GDA: 8 lab brand sites and an autonomous marketing team

GDA is a laboratory group operating several brands in Mexico. Each one has its own site, visual identity and communications calendar, and a single marketing team plans campaigns for all of them at once.

When every brand lives on its own platform and nobody on the team holds permissions, changing a banner stops being a task and becomes a request: the site's pace gets set by someone else's calendar.

• Operational dependency: any content change, however small, joined the queue at IT or at an outside agency.
• One platform per brand: adding a laboratory meant standing up a brand new site, with its own maintenance.
• No way to delegate: there was no way to give one brand owner access without giving them access to every other brand.

The cost was not a late banner. It was campaigns planned around what could be published instead of what needed to be said.

We built a single headless Magnolia platform to govern every brand in the group, with a permission model that lets you delegate one brand without exposing the others.

The goal was not to deliver sites but to deliver autonomy: the platform had to carry 11 brands and, above all, the marketing team had to be able to run it.

One instance, many brands

• Clean Magnolia install and multisite architecture configured on a single instance.
• Content structure shared across brands, with everything specific to a lab handled by configuration rather than code.
• Eleven sites planned on the same platform, eight of them already live.

Per brand permissions, which is what unlocks autonomy

• Role model that scopes each administrator to their own brand: they cannot see or edit anyone else's content.
• The marketing team publishes content and campaign changes on its own, with no IT involvement.
• Each site's banner, once a ticket for a third party, became an edit by the brand owner.

A headless front end of our own

• Front end decoupled from the CMS, consuming content over API and keeping presentation independent from the back office.
• Migration of the content that lived in WordPress into the new content model.

Architecture and technology

• Magnolia CMS in multisite configuration, with a custom headless front end consuming content over API.
• Brand scoped roles and permissions inside a single instance.
• Content migration from WordPress.

Learn more about Magnolia for multibrand.

Learn more about software development.

The group went from needing a third party for every change to a marketing team that publishes on its own, on a platform that already carries eight brands.

Starting point

• A single brand configured on an inherited, undocumented instance.
• Every content change depended on IT or an outside agency.
• No way to delegate administration of one brand on its own.

Results

• Eight brand sites live on one platform, out of eleven planned.
• Delegated administration per brand, with real isolation between laboratories.
• Banners and campaign content managed by the marketing team.

Strategic impact

• Adding a brand stopped being a development project and became a configuration task.
• The communications calendar no longer depends on a third party's availability.