BSN-1010 - Designing Digital Gardens for Multi-Tenant Quartz Publishing

Living Document Notice
Published 2026-09-19. The evolving architecture, revisions, and connected notes for this dispatch live in the Stax Digital Garden.

Designing Digital Gardens for Multi-Tenant Quartz Publishing

Summary

Digital gardens provide an open medium for cultivating evolving ideas, technical documentation, and long-term research. When an engineering studio maintains multiple public publication channels alongside internal development notes, managing publication boundaries becomes a critical architecture challenge. Publishing an entire Obsidian vault directly to the web risks leaking confidential architectural decisions, unvetted drafts, or internal credentials.

To solve this challenge, Bosun PKM structures digital gardens around strict directory segregation and automated publication predicates, using Quartz to compile distinct multi-tenant sites from a single governed vault.

Directory Segregation and the Staging Boundary

A digital garden repository must maintain clear structural boundaries between raw capture, ongoing review, and curated public content. In our architecture, the vault root enforces strict zoning conventions across all tenant directories:

1. 00 Inbox/: Raw captures, conversation transcripts, and automated web clippings.
2. 01 Imported Archive/: Historical archives and third-party note snapshots preserved read-only.
3. 02 Review/: Tenant staging folders where notes undergo quality audits and redaction.
4. 03 Published/: Publicly approved notes organized by tenant publication slug.
5. 04 Evergreen/: Core durable documentation and cross-tenant knowledge assets.
6. 99 Private/: Infrastructure credentials, personal logs, and internal operational data.

stax-digital-garden/
├── 00 Inbox/
├── 01 Imported Archive/
├── 02 Review/
│   ├── bosun-pkm/
│   ├── outrigger/
│   └── freenext/
├── 03 Published/
│   ├── bosun-pkm/
│   ├── outrigger/
│   └── freenext/
├── 04 Evergreen/
└── quartz-site/
    └── content/

The static site generator never runs against the vault root. It points exclusively to quartz-site/content/, a sanitized staging area populated only by automated export scripts that enforce explicit publication predicates.

The Multi-Point Publication Predicate

Before any note transitions from 02 Review/ into public static assets, it must satisfy an automated publication predicate. This verification script evaluates note metadata against strict publication rules:

function Test-GardenPublicationPredicate {
    param([hashtable]$Frontmatter, [string]$BodyText)
    
    # Verify mandatory public publication flags
    if ($Frontmatter['public'] -ne $true) { return $false }
    if ($Frontmatter['review_status'] -ne 'approved') { return $false }
    if ($Frontmatter['draft'] -eq $true) { return $false }
    if ($Frontmatter['redaction_required'] -eq $true) { return $false }
    
    # Audit for private wikilinks pointing to unapproved notes
    $isPrivateRef = $BodyText -match '\[\[(00 Inbox|99 Private|01 Imported Archive)'
    if ($isPrivateRef) {
        return $false
    }
    
    # Verify presence of authorized approver attribution
    if ([string]::IsNullOrWhiteSpace($Frontmatter['approved_by'])) {
        return $false
    }
    
    return $true
}

If a note fails any predicate rule, the export pipeline skips the file and logs the reason to an audit manifest. Notes flagged as drafts or pending review remain quarantined inside local review directories.

Multi-Tenant Routing and Domain Isolation

A single unified digital garden can publish dispatches across multiple standalone tenant domains. During the Quartz build process, an orchestration script routes markdown files into distinct target collections based on the blog property defined in the YAML frontmatter.

Tenant Blog Identifier	Target Subdomain	Publication Path	Primary Content Focus
bosun-pkm	garden.bosunpkm.com	/bosun-pkm	Core PKM engine architecture
outrigger	outrigger.bosunpkm.com	/outrigger	Agent sandboxing and devops specs
freenext	freenext.app	/freenext	Data migration and export utilities
freemydata	freemydata.tech	/freemydata	Local-first browser tools

Separating source governance from static output generation gives teams complete confidence when publishing notes. Private notes remain secure while verified dispatches deploy reliably across independent domains.

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• Directus Target: bosunpkm-blog
• Garden Source Reference: MOC - Bosun PKM Engine, MOC - Bosun PKM Tools, MOC - Harbor Ecosystem, MOC - Fleet Operations, HAR-1004 - Compiling Digital Gardens with Quartz