Efficient modeling of minimal surfaces is a challenging problem and hot topic in the field of geometric design and computation. Taking boundary closed polylines, this paper proposes a general framework to construct discrete minimal surfaces with quadrilateral meshes. First, the mathematical definition of discrete minimal surface with quadrilateral mesh is given from the intrinsic differential-geometry metric of surfaces. Next, based on the length-preserving boundary projection method, quad-mesh generation approach and non-linear numerical optimization technique, a novel framework is presented to construct discrete minimal surfaces with quadrilateral meshes from a described boundary closed discrete polylines. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is illustrated by several modeling examples. The results show that the proposed method can achieve high-quality modeling of discrete minimal surfaces and provide potential usage in architecture geometry.