www.manh.com

Manhattan Associates wanted to put a fresh face on its web site to truly speak to its audience. With more than 1,200 customers worldwide, the global leader in supply chain management needed a site that communicated its mission in eight different languages. Manhattan Associates turned to Mediacurrent to meet the challenges of an existing Drupal 6 site that lagged in performance and functionality. The September 2011 re-launch of Manhattan’s Drupal site highlights the open source content management system’s tremendous multi-lingual capabilities.The refreshed www.manh.com, with more than 2500 translated nodes, helped put several of the latest and greatest Drupal translation modules and services through some demanding tests.

Company Background

Atlanta-based Manhattan Associates is a 20-year-old, publicly traded company and a leading provider of supply chain solutions with offices in nine countries. The Manhattan customer base includes 9 of the top 11 retail supply chains, nearly half of the top 100 motor carriers, 7 of the 12 largest 3PLs and 9 of Fortune’s 25 most admired companies. Their primary website www.manh.com is a single Drupal 6 installation powering the main corporate site and 7 international versions.

Project Overview

In the Fall of 2010, Manhattan Associates turned to Mediacurrent to relaunch their existing corporate site that was already on Drupal 6. The Manhattan stakeholders sought to make a series of strategic improvements.  The project was made more challenging because we were inheriting the work of a previous vendor. This can present problems because potential “gotchas” cannot be fully discovered until we take a
deep dive into the code after the project is underway.

Manhattan’s main goal was to lay a solid foundation for future growth and site enhancements. Key requirements for the project included:

• Updating the sites with more fresh, relevant content that better reflects Manhattan Associates’ position as a thought leader in the supply chain industry.
• Ensuring that Drupal best practices had been adhered to throughout the site.
• Optimizing the site for maximum search engine visibility to increase revenue generation.
• Improve the overall site navigation, branding, and messaging across all web presence points.
• Assist Manhattan with guidance on managing the translation of the majority their content across eight global sites.

Mediacurrent sought to support Manhattan Associates’ position as a global leader in the supply chain market and to compel visitors to action. The Manhattan team wanted the site to be more educational, engaging, compelling, and provide regionally-specific content that could add value to the
target audience. The site is visited by a cross-section of targeted audiences including people that influence and make purchase decisions for supply chain solutions, existing customers, potential partners and new hires, the media, and investors.

Challenges and Solutions

Manhattan Associates’ original architecture required a complete review to correct some common development issues. Changes made to the original architecture include migrating logic from template files to custom modules and locating some legacy code that would be better implemented as an established contributed module. Some contributed modules were upgraded or replaced where necessary, and the current configuration and settings were
reviewed.

Because of time requirements, the team was asked to help manage a complete translation effort in parallel with the development process. Mediacurrent leveraged the Translation Management module to empower a mix of professional translators and Manhattan Associates content managers to work together and translate hundreds of nodes of content into multiple languages. This allowed the team to work with real translated content during development and launch immediately upon the completion of feature development and theme updates.

Manhattan’s legacy website contained a resource library with limited filtering capabilities and no association with related areas of the site. Mediacurrent leveraged Views, Domain Access, Taxonomy, Views Accordion and some custom development to upgrade the resource library. The end result was a fully accessible tool that allows Manhattan to publish resources across multiple domains. A dynamic resource accordion
displays resources relevant to the current page on content outside of the resource library.

Tight integration with CSM and Analytics was another requirement of the refresh. With Google Analytics, Eloqua CRM, and Webform modules, the site now provides quality metrics on usage and helps facilitate communication between potential customers looking for more information on specific subjects.

Finally, the team was tasked with increasing site performance across all domains. By utilizing Drupal’s standard caching feature and reviewing all custom code for bottlenecks, we were able to expand functionality and increase traffic while simultaneously increasing performance. For example, page load times for the homepage were reduced from 15.4 seconds to 4.9 seconds (and 1.9 seconds on repeat views), as measured using webpagetest.org on launch day.

Module List / Technical Details

The family of corporate sites utilizes over 160 contributed and custom modules to power all of the features on www.manh.com. Key contributed modules
include Views, CCK, the Domain Access suite of modules, i18n, and Translation Management.

Views: Utilized to organize resources and events; providing an easy to use filterable library of content.

CCK: Used for generation of complex content types.

Domain Access: Used to enable Manhattan Associates to use their vast library of translated resources to quickly create promotional and marketing sites, and to help with cross publishing of content between the main international corporate sites.

I18n: Utilized to enable complete translation of Manhattan content across five languages.

Translation Management: Out of the box translation workflow service and ui. Translation Management was utilized to allow Manhattan Associates to translate new and legacy content during the development process.

Custom modules include:

Manh Custom Slideshow: Custom built flash slideshow that integrates with its own content type and Domain Access integration. This module allows for the management of the frontpage slideshow for International domain and featured intelligent degradation to javascript and images for non-flash enabled users.

Manh Custom Eloqua: Custom Eloqua CRM integration utilizing Webform 3 API to automate insertion of Customer Data into Eloqua. Also provides custom gated asset functionality that allows for some resources to be gated, and determines if the user has already registered with Eloqua.

Language Code Alias: Allows admins to create an alias for language codes and use that alias as a token. This module assisted in creating custom document management architecture. Post project Mediacurrent was able to contributeLanguage Code Alias back to the Drupal community. 

Theming

Manhattan’s internal design team took on the task of refreshing the site as part of this project. Mediacurrent’s role during the refresh phase was to shadow the design team and consult with stakeholders on Drupal integration and Drupal best practices. To ensure quality during the development and theming stages, Mediacurrent held a daily 15 minute call with shareholders to review project status and address any bugs or issues with the theme. The “Daily” as we called it proved to help all stakeholders focus on identifying and addressing launch critical road blocks.

Older Internet Explorer browsers such as IE6 and IE7 were important for Manhattan, because metrics indicated high usage rates in China. The contributed “Nice Menus” module was used to support the primary menu, and special attention was give to meet a series of compatibility issues in IE7. The issues were mainly around spacing and alignment. Also, because the site is translated into many languages, special CSS conditions were added to adjust for longer words and phrases.

The site uses the contributed “Blueprint Theme” as a base theme. The primary reason Blueprint was chosen is because it has a built-in grid structure similar to 960gs. Blueprint makes creating page layout variations very easy in Drupal. The site’s layout was extremely straightforward and did not require a dynamic column width per page or content type, but it will be easy to adjust as needed in the future.

One area of emphasis for Manhattan was the social media links at bottom of page. The contributed module called “Menu Attribute” made adding classes to Drupal’s default menu output very easy. This allowed for background icons to be integrated using CSS classes attached to the Drupal menu links. Also, if Manhattan expands its social media footprint in the future, it will be painless to update and add new icons in-line with the other links.

Manhattan required special icons and layout considerations for its resources sections. This was one of the more challenging aspects of the project. Most conditions were managed right from the Views user interface, but there was a need to create several view templates with complex conditional logic to achieve the more complex layouts.

Overall the theme was not complex, but Manhattan wanted to make sure that the HTML structure was semantic and that all HTML elements had an associated style. Mediacurrent created what we call a benchmark page. This is a page where examples of all HTML or common elements are listed. This was used as a means to proof pages or scenarios that did not exist within current content on the site but would be ready for use if an occasion arises.

Final Thoughts

With a complete parallel effort of development, theming, content entry and translation all overlapping, the www.manh.com refresh project proved quite
challenging. The team helped stretch the i18n and Translation Management modules to their limits, but ultimately a robust, truly global web site was produced.

About Mediacurrent

Mediacurrent is a metro-Atlanta headquartered web agency that has become a renowned leader in the powerful, open-source based content management system called Drupal. We are home to an elite team of Drupal experts, who have a proven track record of building amazing websites. We strongly believe in open-source principles, collaboration, and sharing knowledge to strengthen the Drupal community. For more information regarding Mediacurrent's services and portfolio please visit www.mediacurrent.com.

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