Pegasystems, the leader in business process management software, migrated its web site, pega.com, from an internal ASP-based solution to Drupal in November of 2010. The open source content management system (CMS) can now count the 8th fastest-growing company from Fortune Magazine's 2010 list as a member of the Drupal community.

For 28 years Pegasystems has provided solutions to help its prestigious client base to "build for change" with software that drives revenue growth, improves customer experience and transforms operational efficiency. Part of its commitment to its customers is its "insanely open" architecture. Last year it announced compatibility with the industry standard CMIS, and choosing the leading open source CMS (Content Management System) for its on-line community of customers and partners made sense. Pega’s rapid hiring and average growth of close to 30 percent revenue increases for five consecutive years meant it needed a website that could scale quickly, and yet empower its customers, partners and marketers with an exceptional on-line experience.

Pegasystems turned to Mediacurrent to migrate the legacy site's content onto an Acquia-hosted solution and implement a new theme tied to a re-branding of the company's entire visual identity.

"I think we've turned the web site around 180 degrees through Mediacurrent's effective deployment of a robust Drupal install on Acquia," said Russell Keziere, Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Pegasystems. "Our marketers now feel empowered and see the web as a real interactive channel to engage with customers and deliver real results."

The project team from Mediacurrent would like to share some of what we've learned while bringing this new enterprise client into the Drupal community.

About the Customer

Pegasystems, Inc. is an international, publicly traded (NASDAQ: Pega) software company based in Cambridge, Mass. For several years in a row, they have been recognized by independent analysts firms as the leader in the Business Process Management (BPM) market. The company had a dilemma that many rapidly growing organizations face. In 2010, Pega identified its corporate website as outdated and in need of a major overhaul to a more flexible, robust CMS. Pega had large amounts of legacy data needing migration along with plenty of new assets to incorporate into the rebuilt site.

Pega completed a meticulous evaluation when determining which CMS was best suited for their needs. Pega first experimented with a Drupal forums microsite at forums.pega.com. Pega also had a geographic advantage of having Acquia, the commercial entity founded by the creator of Drupal, literally in their backyard (the Acquia and Pega corporate offices were less than 10 miles away). Mediacurrent was engaged to lead development and architecture efforts, partnered with Acquia on hosting and infrastructure needs.

Goals

With a project of this magnitude, one of the first things Mediacurrent likes to do is to conduct an in-depth, on-site discovery and strategic planning meeting. In this case, Jeff Diecks, Senior Project Manager at Mediacurent, visited Cambridge to meet with the key Pega stakeholders. The sessions are designed to define the feature set of the new site, and determine the goals and success factors for the project. In short, what are we trying to accomplish?

The goals that were identified included:

• Create a place to collect great ideas and resources. The legacy site lacked organization through tagging and dynamic relationships of content offered by Drupal.
• Improve conversion, measured by membership registrations, profile updates, contact requests and other user interactive features.
• Increase unique visitors and time spent on site.
• Improve page load times.
• Remove inefficiencies from the publishing workflow of the legacy site.
• Improving performance and page load times.
• Better scalability for support and maintenance, as the incumbent site had a heavy dependency on a few people.

Challenges and Solutions

Pega's incumbent site was a homegrown, ASP-based framework that was literally bursting at the seams. This type of cobbled system is not uncommon whenever an enterprise-level organization begins to experience rapid growth. There were a number of challenges to highlight:

Performance/Caching: Pega has a large amount of authenticated vs. anonymous traffic, which can potentially bottleneck performance. Pega used Acquia hosting with a dedicated database server and load balancer. In addition, the team relied on Pressflow, memcache, authcache and various other contributed modules to handle Pega's authenticated and anonymous traffic.

The site's performance for anonymous traffic showed immediate improvement over the previous version, with first loads of the homepage improving by more than two seconds and repeat visits reduced from more than eight seconds to less than one.

Performance for authenticated traffic disappointed at first. With the help of Acquia and tools such as New Relic to identify and remove bottlenecks, the site's performance for these users was also improved over time.

Also of interest, during the project Mediacurrent developed a new approach for page caching aimed at striking a balance between longer cache lifetimes and fast updates when new content is published. For this, the powerful Rules module was leveraged. Jay Callicott detailed the approach to rules-based cache clearing in a blog post.

Migrating/Merging Content: Pega.com had large amounts of static content and database files to merge with their forum (Drupal) and blog (Wordpress) microsites, streamlined into one Drupal site. Thousands of attachments in the legacy system made this a particular challenge. Without a turn-key solution to achieve this custom import and merger, Mediacurrent used a hybrid approach with contributed modules, custom code, drush scripts and some old-fashioned copy-pasting.

Private Groups: Pega wanted to provide customers with a branded homepage area for private dialogue. With Panels powering the pages, Views to fill in the content and Organic Groups handling the user access and content grouping logistics, members of Pega's impressive client list gained their own private versions of pega.com. Extra steps were necessary to prevent content flagged for groups from appearing in the site's public search results.

Translation: Pega's editors needed tools to translate menus and content into four languages. Translation affects content, views and menus and has a cascading impact on nearly everything in a Drupal site. It was a real challenge to not only find all the related translation contributed modules, but to configure them all properly.

Download tracking: Pega relies heavily on statistics for document downloads and media plays. Using a custom solution, metrics are tracked via a simple redirect which provides reliable statistics for the marketing department.

Contributed Modules

The following modules of note, grouped by category, are among those that were installed for the site:

Performance: Memcache, Boost, Authcache
Presentation: Panels, Views, Context
Content: CCK, CCK Fieldgroup tabs, Nodeblock, Nodepicker, COD Support
Groups: Organic Groups
Translation: i18n, i18n Menu Node
Menus: Menu Block, Menu Editor, Menu Breadcrumb
Content Migration: Backup and Migrate, Node Export

Of particular note is the use of Panels. This module and its approach at site building draws its fair share of fans and detractors. The Mediacurrent team has had plenty of debates in staff meetings about the use of Panels. For this site and this client, Panels was a critical solution. Because members of the marketing team responsible for pega.com have a reasonably high level of technical ability, they are able to navigate through the sometimes-challenging user interface of Panels and reap the ultimate rewards of the flexibility it offers for layout and control of site pages.

Features

The site's lead architect, Jay Callicott, can be considered a Features Booster. In fact he's presented on the topic at several Drupal events.

Every content type and major feature of the site is represented as a Feature for these reasons:

1. Clarity: Any overrides related to a content type live in the feature created for that content type, encapsulates views, content types, panels, taxonomy and .module code into 1 module feature
2. Performance: views are retrieved from code instead of the database
3. Backup: features backs up import features of the sites, views/content types/etc to code which is version controlled

Features of note:

VBO Admin Content: View-based VBO (views bulk operations) admin content screen replacement has title search, ajax and is customizable to add client specific filters
VBO Admin User: View-based VBO admin user screen replacement has username/email lookup and is customizable
Rotating Content Banner: A generic module that combines nodequeue, imagecache, a view and a CCK content type to give the client an easy homepage article/image rotator. This is a module that Mediacurrent now uses on multiple sites.
Pega My Library: integrates with flag module to allow users to view and share content they've saved (flagged) with other users. Uses a VBO view to prepopulate a form that emails users by email.
Pega Resource Search: Contains views + panel page and works with ajax filters that lets users easily filter resource content and save to their library.
Pega Group: Combines a panel page + views + CCK content type to create a custom group landing page with views pulling relevant group content for private customer homepages.
Pega Editor's Choice: Combines jquery with views + a CCK content type to allow editor's to setup an arbitrary collection of content folded into a jquery accordion widget. They can additional control the visibility by selecting which node pages or paths they want the block to appear on.

Custom Modules

Most of the custom logic needed for the site was placed in the .module files of the Features. Only a handful of small custom modules that altered behavior were not directly related to a Feature. Three notable custom modules from the site:

1. Views ajax filters: A small custom module that works with the 'Better exposed filters' views helper module to convert checkbox/select exposed filters into one-click ajax filters.
2. Webform taxonomy select: For webform 3x, this is a generic module that exposes all taxonomy as lists to the webform. Mediacurrent considered releasing this as a contributed module, but webform will eventually have view support to incorporate the same kind of logic.
3. Eloqua: A small generic module that includes Eloqua javascript into the page load and provides a redirect API function.

Theming/Design

In conjunction with the migration from its legacy platform, pega.com was also redesigned as part of the project. The redesign was one component of an overall re-branding of all company materials (logo, collateral, etc). Pega's marketing team worked with third-party design and marketing agencies to develop the new brand. Mockups and style guides for the new web site were developed as part of this process. In this scenario, Mediacurrent typically provides consultation for the client and third-party agency, to ensure that the pages being designed can also be efficiently transformed into a Drupal theme. Once the designs were finalized and approved by Pega, PSDs were handed over to the project team to build the site's custom theme. The design and theme left plenty of room for flexibility and customization on individual pages, as the Pega team leverages Panels and the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor to create different layouts and presentation styles for new content as needed.

Community Contributions

Often the focus of community contributions for a project remains on the code or modules that were contributed back to Drupal, and rightfully so in order to help Drupal continue to grow and prosper. While code was contributed as part of this project, such as an Authcache patch, Organic Groups Forum patch, Organic Groups issue, Nodepicker issue and patches for the Conference Organizing Distribution Support Modules, the addition of large enterprise organizations to Drupal serves as a boost to the community beyond code. For example, Pega's decision to use Drupal provided financial impact for Acquia (hosting and enterprise subscription), Lullabot (employees attended training), OSTraining (employees attended training), among other Drupal businesses. Pega also hired employees with Drupal experience and can now serve as another logo to add to everyone's "Who is using Drupal?" slides in their sales decks. Large enterprise organizations also help validate the value of existing contributed modules by selecting them for installation, as a module's credibility rises if it is being used in support of a company with nearly $400 million in annual revenue. For example, the new Conference Organizing Distribution can now include Pegaworld, Pega's annual conference, to its showcase.

Final Thoughts

Pegasystems' adoption of Drupal is another feather in the cap for the community. With each large enterprise that is added to the platform, the community benefits in many direct and indirect ways. Those in the Drupal community can be particularly proud of winning over one of the fastest growing technology companies that places a corporate emphasis on thought leadership.

The pega.com migration and redesign proves once again that Drupal can support large, fast-moving organizations with flexible and highly configurable solutions.

Best of all, Pegasystems is coming back for more from Drupal. The pega.com platform is currently being extended into a multi-site installation, to serve other microsites and individual initiatives for additional departments within the company. Pega describes its patented technology with a registered trademark phrase of "Build for Change." Drupal has helped the pega.com web site remain in line with this philosophy.

About Mediacurrent

Mediacurrent helps
organizations architect custom websites by leveraging our proven processes and
deep expertise in 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 http://www.mediacurrent.com.

Project Team

Mediacurrent
Jay Callicott - development, lead architect
Andy Thornton - development
Chris Hales - development
Brent Ratliff - development
Jeff Diecks - project management