Manhattan Associates Leads the Way with Drupal 8

A look inside one of the world’s first fully translated enterprise Drupal 8 projects.

Project Highlights

Mediacurrent helped Manhattan Associates, the global leader in international supply chain management, evaluate Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 to define the best choice for their business needs.

Results include:

Improved navigation, branding, and messaging with a completely custom Drupal 8 theme
Seamless integration with chosen CRM and marketing automation software to support investment in digital strategy
Moving to the Website Operations (WebOps) platform, Pantheon, the Mediacurrent team was able to improve their advanced workflows to deliver on strategic initiatives

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Full translation across multiple international sites
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Mediacurrent-led contributions to Drupal 8 core modules, benefitting the client and the entire Drupal community
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Among the first enterprise-level websites to launch on Drupal 8

Visit Manh.com

Development

Early Adoption

Although Drupal 8’s core met 95% of site requirements, some additional modules were needed. By forecasting additional support and mindfully selecting a realistic number of out-of-core contributed modules to work with, Mediacurrent was able to adopt these incomplete modules and finish them out within budget.

We Know Drupal

Development

Internationalization

Manhattan leveraged the Core translation capabilities in Drupal 8 (designed to support any language, with built-in capabilities to manage translations) to serve targeted marketing materials and company resources to all of their global markets.

Made for Multilingual

Improved language handling and interface translation mean that Drupal 8 is a whole new world for multilingual sites — essential to representing Manhattan’s global presence.

Continuous Translation

An integration with Lingotek’s automated, cloud-based translation management system, empowers Manhattan to translate, localize, update, and publish content in a single, uninterrupted workflow.

Reaching Global Markets

So that users only see products in the markets where they are available, Mediacurrent developers wrote a custom module that overrides Drupal’s default language fallback behavior.

DevOps and Workflows

Mediacurrent experienced issues with code not running properly between dev and test environments. This hindered our ability to quickly iterate on deliverables. Post-launch, Mediacurrent partnered with Pantheon for reliable hosting and the platform’s suite of dev tools and agile workflows. Leveraging Pantheon’s workflows allowed us to improve our team’s efficiency and produce value at a higher velocity. Pantheon’s support team also played a large part in helping find solutions to complex issues. With dedicated account management, Mediacurrent was able to leverage a technical support team that gave us higher quality answers faster.

Working with the Mediacurrent team to launch eight corporate websites globally, at the same time, has been an extremely positive experience for us. They are conscientious, responsive, professional, and knowledgeable about all that is Drupal. We look forward to a long-term partnership.

Beverly McDonaldSr. Director Corporate Marketing, Manhattan Associates

Project Management

Managing Risk

The ability to launch this site on time and within budget came from a smart, upfront investment of planning and risk management between both teams. To estimate an accurate budget and project roadmap, Mediacurrent performed an exhaustive analysis of Drupal 8’s then beta-stage core and contrib issues and the timeline for completion on these issues.

Theming

Responsive Design

Manhattan’s new layout relies heavily on Entity Reference fields and three View Modes for one-, two- and three-column displays. This provides amazing flexibility for page builders and the marketing team to create and deliver effective content that shines on any device.

Final Thoughts

The advancements of the Drupal 8 platform, including support for translation, and the capacity to plug and play with third party technologies, empower Manhattan Associates to quickly adapt its global digital strategy. Mediacurrent’s development expertise, flexible approach, and strategic vision were critical to meet the challenges of this early adoption.