Sector(s)

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

Community contributions

Two modules were contributed to community: Node Translation Access allows to control visibility of Drupal nodes based on a user’s current language. This way, some products are allowed to be accessible only by users located in Japan, for example.

Also, the Context reaction: node template module allows administrators to set a node's template as context reaction. Depending on the context, the node template module can choose a node.tpl.php file for node (not page.tpl.php) as context reaction.

About Acronis

The rise of virtualization, the explosion of data creation and the opportunities in Cloud services offer are bringing new challenges to maintaining effective backup and disaster recovery programs for critical data.

Acronis helps users securely migrate, protect and recover critical data wherever it resides in their physical, virtual or cloud environments. With the Unified Platform and new generation technology, its innovative solutions are designed to ease the management burden and reduce total cost of ownership while improving recovery time objectives.

  • Over 5,000,000 individual customers and over 500,000 business customers in a broad range of industries have chosen Acronis to protect their business continuity.
  • Strong Acronis partners ecosystem reaches customers in more than 145 countries worldwide.
  • Acronis offer 24/7 assistance to their customers worldwide through their award-winning customer support centres.

Acronis products have won many different awards and are well-known as secure, solid and stable disk backup solutions worldwide. And now ADCI Solutions are proud to announce that we have built a website to popularize and sell these outstanding applications.

About the project

Content Structure
Acronis offers more than 20 products, many of which are meant to be used with a cloud storage system. Each product has numerous purchasing options as well, and all of these different variables are handled by Drupal’s back-end.

The flexibility of Drupal’s content types let us easily customize the site for visitors and easily update site’s content under different conditions (particular locale(s), time, etc.), so one has an optimal user experience and sees most relevant content on the site. One of the solutions we chose to use was the Corresponding node references module, which gave us great results for performance and flexibility in the Views configuration.

Multilingual
The Acronis website is multilingual, and supports more than 10 languages across more than 20 countries and geographic regions. We use Entity Translation to have Drupal content translatable and a customized Translation Management Tool module to satisfy our content translating needs. Each region has special product price and currency. Some content and products are restricted on locale/country basis.

Flexible Product Promotions
From time to time, the Acronis team arranges promotions for their products with bonuses and discounts. These promotions are specifically targeted at different regions and last varying amounts of time. To make sure the right people in the right places see the right promotions, we designed a flexible system: nodes of special content type connect to appropriate nodes to replace fields with new values like a new price. When the promotion is over, the special nodes are removed/disabled and the product is displayed normally with no extra actions needed.

Site Administration
The Acronis team is large, with numerous different roles. There are content managers, translators, an SEO team, a promotions team and others, all of whom need the ability to change content quickly and easily and have appropriate permission to be able to perform actions for their role specific needs only. Drupal automatically keeps revision history for every page, allowing users to see who made what modifications and when they did so. This also makes it possible to move between revisions quickly, when necessary. Additionally Workbench Moderation module was installed to enhance Drupal revisioning functionality. In addition Nodeblock module was installed to convert static blocks to nodes - this let us add revisioning functionality to the site’s blocks which would not have otherwise retained that information, making it easy to make changes and revert to previous versions like other content, when necessary.

Adaptive Theme
The ADCI Solutions team built a flexible, adaptive theme that optimized the Acronis website for viewing on desktop screens, tablets, and smartphones. With this theme, every action that can be performed with mouse and keyboard can be also done with touchscreen. AdaptiveTheme is used as a base for our theme solution.

For part of the design, we we used HTML 5 and CSS 3 features. For older browsers, which don’t support HTML 5 and CSS 3, layouts for the Acronis website may differ. However, the site supports all modern browsers, including IE 8+.

Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment
Because the Acronis website is updated almost every day, we use Continuous Integration process based on Jenkins. This way, we are always sure the system works fine with each commit to code repository. To make sure all code adheres to coding standards and best practices, we check all commits with the Coder module, PHP mess detector, copy-paste detector, and run different kinds of tests after each commit and/or before deployment. Phing is also used to easily and efficiently deploy updates between development servers, staging sites, and production sites.

Performance
As a server solution, we use Linux OS with nginx as server application. This configuration itself gives great performance results. However, we also use a caching system that stores almost every page on the website. This is a great solution since most of the site’s traffic is from anonymous users - we simply serve up a cached page that lacks any of the changes that users see when they are logged-in.

Why Drupal was chosen

Rich content authoring capabilities are very important for the Acronis website because of frequent content updates and new content additions. Content revisioning and moderation needed to be possible for all content on the site.

The site has to be multilingual to provide proper content to site visitors worldwide.

Administration capabilities with different roles and permissions are also important for the site since many people involved in site maintenance and content authoring worldwide.

Acronis and ADCI Solutions looked at multiple different content management systems, but ultimately landed on Drupal. The size and activity of the Drupal community guaranteed our clients that it would be easy to continuously update their website to keep it up to date with best practices. Drupal core flexibility and the large number of high-quality contributed modules allows to respond fast to Acronis team needs changes and extend existing or add new functionality.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

We did quite a lot of customization in translation process. Translation Management Tool was chosen as a base for our translation module. We added filters that would select all of the content from one page at once (all blocks, nodes being used in views), and would then create a job to translate the page.
Also we added a possibility to re-import jobs if needed (by default Translation Management Tool doesn’t allow doing this).