Optimizing Multisite Management for an Ecological Transformation Firm

Making Multilingual Website and Customer Portal Management Time-Efficient with Acquia

The customer, an innovative ecological transformation solutions provider, was looking to improve their multilingual websites and portals' functionalities. We worked together with Acquia to:

Cater to all the subscribers in their languages
Offer brand consistency across multisites for different initiatives
Empower the sites with great usability, security, and scalability

We relied on Drupal, Acquia Site Factory, and Content Hub to enhance our customer’s digital assets to achieve the desired results.

With 288 live multilingual websites and 11 customer portals for various business units, the customer can now develop sites in a few minutes as opposed to weeks earlier.

About The Customer

The customer is known for developing and implementing sustainable solutions to fight pollution and prevent vital natural resources from depletion. They are constantly committed to replenishing the earth through their environmental services.

They are driven by the purpose of contributing to human progress by way of sticking to the Sustainable Development Goals set by the UN.

€42K+
Million in Revenue in ‘22
150+
Years of Legacy
200K+
EmployeesWorldwide in ‘22

The Challenge

The customer’s websites and client portals had the following challenges:

Backlog Defects from Previous Development of Global Sites
The customer’s global sites were prebuilt on Site Factory and needed enhanced security and scalability features. There was also a need for making multilingual site creation and maintenance better.
Unoptimized Multilingual Setup for Customer Portals
The customer runs different portals representing various business units to be sold to customers. This required custom features and login capabilities apart from integrations and domain management capabilities.

The Solution

The solution was divided in two major phases:

Content Hub Customization for Global Sites
While the customer was already using Acquia Content Hub, we understood that specific customizations would help them achieve the best results in terms of default language, translation, branding, scalability, integration, and analytics. Accordingly, we took all the customer's specific requirements and made customizations to Content Hub.
Marketing Automation Platform
We’ve also conducted discovery, analysis, and deliberations on how Acquia Campaign Studio can be used to automate Franklin Madison’s marketing experience platform. With this, their vendors could start using email as a channel of engagement to connect with prospects, get end-users to sign-up for new programs, and to improve the platform’s conversion rate.

The Result

Axelrant’s expertise in engineering Content Hub helped the customer make their website and customer portals better with Acquia. We also enabled them to achieve scalability in development and maintenance.

Whereas earlier content publishing used to take weeks, it takes only a few days now. With the use of Dependency Calculation logic content publishing queue has been shortened substantially without technical bottlenecks.

Better Multilingual Experience
Customising Content Hub for capabilities has enabled the customer to offer a consistent language experience across the globe.

Integration with translation services, automated workflows, metadata and taxonomy, content variants and overrides, and user interface localization has enable, etc., helped the client manage multilingual sites better.

Scalability in Portal Development
At the start of the project, one of two planned portals were live. With our expertise and support 11 serving different business units are live as of now.

During this course, we have added a gamut of features to these portals, for example, custom login for different screens.

No Downtime
288 global sites were already live when we started making enhancements. We devised our strategy and implementation in such a manner as does not affect the live sites.

We executed continuous enhancements based on priority, making sure the sites are still available for the new customer.

Improved Design
Adding Customizations
Multilingual Setup
Multiple Integrations
Upgrade to Drupal 10

Improved Design

The global sites had an existing design which was not ready to serve as a good frame of feature enhancements. Our design team developed a more interactive design to enable better calibration.

As part of the project requirement, we needed to create the capability to support multiple design versions for the global site. We needed a feature to show new fields for a better user experience. By customizing Drupal Core settings we enabled the option for the development team to leverage multiple versions for the global sites.

Adding Customizations

Partial Syndication with Content Hub
We customized the Content Hub to provide an option for excluding the fields from being syndicated.
Google Map Locations
Earlier, when the user used to search for location, they were listed alphabetically. We customized the search function of the Site Factory to sort the list per the distance from the search location in ascending order.
Multiple Profile Option
We created different profiles for the customer to choose from while creating a new website on ACSF. Based on the profile, the modules and functionalities would be available to them.

customization-multisite-axelerant-acquia

Multilingual Setup

Multilingual sites were not properly set, which made it a challenge to cater multiple websites in different languages across the globe.

English should have been the default language in the disabled state to be able to support Content Hub and Site Studio. However, it was not so.

We fixed it to improve the Content Hub translations module. In parallel, we also enabled new tickets to auto-align the new sites with the multilingual setup.

multilingual-setup-global-sites-axelerant-acquia

Multiple Integrations

The site uses Site Studio on React. This is for authenticated users who have access to the website login. This is how we customized the portals through integrations:

Rendering data for the customer (analytics-related data) through Customer APIs.
Ease of login by integrating SSO login with Drupal login (One Login, Keycloak, Okta)
Custom login using APIs from OneLogin to provide flexibility for the customer to create the login pages within Drupal using Site Studio instead of the regular one login screen.
Forgot password and reset password with OneLogin APIs
Integration with Didomi for cookie consent
Dynamic replacement of roles and username for authenticated users through Lemon Learning integration
Role-based home page
Deployed the D10 upgrade compatibility code for all contributed and custom extensions
Regenerating the access token with the help of Refresh using React Axios interceptor for handling the scenarios of APIs erroring out

single-sign-on-integration-axelerant-acquia

Upgrade to Drupal 10

As Drupal 9’s end of life approached, we needed to be ready for keeping the websites and portals running smoothly and safely.

We needed customizations related to CK Editor. We had also integrated a third-party library Didomi consent for cookie consent management. We have also set up YouTube and Vimeo tracking based on user consent preference. All this needed an upgrade to Drupal 10 to function flawlessly.

During the D10 upgrade, we also contributed a patch (accepted) for a code error in the Site Studio module. Additionally, we contributed a patch to fix the Site Studio module errors.

Optimizing Multisite Management For An Innovative Ecological Transformation Company