Lyreco

With a presence in over 42 countries, managing, updating and maintaining such a large number of websites can quickly become a problem. In addition, at the corporate identity level, it was necessary to have the tools that guarantee that each subsidiary had the freedom to define its contents but that the design remains consistent within a globally defined framework.

In other words, Metadrop had to develop a centralized and resilient system for generating potentially infinite sites from a common codebase and, at the same time, ensure enough flexibility and independence for each single site.

Requirements

1. Multisite and multi-language:
   • The ability to quickly generate potentially infinite websites from a single codebase, each one for a different region of the world.
   • A global configuration for all the websites and a way to easily override some settings per environment, per site and per site and environment.
   • The ability to independently localize each site to one or several languages. Some sites can have their own English version and many of them need to be translated to all the official languages of a particular country or region.
      

     

2. Editorial and design needs:
   • A vast collection of components easily reusable and composable when generating new content and pages.
   • Centralized and enforced corporate identity that closely follows the specifications of the design agency. 
   • A very specific site structure without a home page, organized around sections that serve as a sort of “micro-sites” with their own homepage and contextual menu.
   • Editorial workflows, scheduling and content preview links.
3. Workday integration:
   • A global job search engine integrated with the ERM Workday.
   • Seamless integration, fully integrated with the page design and without data replication: Workday has to remain the single source of truth.

What makes this project remarkable

The main milestone of this project is the seamless integration of the configuration, multi-language, multistite and configuration systems of Drupal in a way that enables the quick bootstrapping of new websites while maintaining a centralized codebase.

In addition, the use of External Entities to integrate the third-service provider Workday was an innovative solution that prevented the need for a migration. With External Entities, the job offers’ data is queried and cached on Drupal, but not stored. This allows us to offer a full experience to the end-user without having to duplicate any information.

Lastly, Metadrop developed a large paragraphs-based component library and put in place an extended suite of editorial helpers, workflows and features in order to allow for great flexibility and power within a well-established corporate identity.

Problems solved

During the development, we solved the following problems:

• The quick bootstrap of new sites required the creation of a custom Profile with some automated tasks, like the generation of some content using Default Content or changing all the content to the target language.
• For achieving the requirements of centralization and flexibility, we developed a complex configuration override system. The global configuration can be overridden per site, per environment and per site and environment.
• Each site’s codebase is generated from a script executed by a Jenkins job. This job takes a repository and generates an artifact that is committed to a different repository, thus differentiating the source and the final build.
• The complete internationalization of the corporate websites required the ability to override some typefaces for specific languages (as Thai) and to introduce the capacity of displaying dates in calendars other than the Gregorian, like the Buddhist.
• The client put a great emphasis on design guidelines and corporate identity. To ensure this, we put our best tools at work: a carefully curated set of paragraphs with exposed settings, custom integrations of paragraphs with other systems (like views or webforms), adaptation of third-party resources like Eloqua newsletter forms and a living style guide. Moreover, for testing purposes we used visual regression tools as part of our QA process.
• We had to develop a custom solution in order to query the SOAP-based Workday endpoint.
   

  

• Workday was integrated by using External Entities in order to avoid data migration. We put into place a Search API-based solution backed by a Solr server, faceted search and a cron-based task for synchronizations. This way, we managed to offer all of the Drupal’s and Search API core functionality without actually storing the Workday data.
• The site has no homepage and is structured instead around sections with their own homepage and menus. We had to develop a custom solution for handling this very specific request.
• A Custom 404 page was developed in order to engage users and extend their experience by changing an error page into a list of opportunities. This way, Lyreco can extend the user visiting time on the website and prevent bounces.
• We used Metadrop’s supported module Node Auth Link to allow the editors to share links to unpublished content in order to be reviewed or validated.