Manhattan Associates Drupal 8 Redesign

Manhattan Associates knew they needed a website redesign that would meet their requirements and help them accomplish their business goals long-term. The biggest question was: Drupal 7 or Drupal 8? At the time, Drupal 8 was in beta but it had a lot of very promising new features that were exactly what Manhattan needed. Mediacurrent partnered with Manhattan Associates to evaluate Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 and ultimately decide on Drupal 8 based on the key features Manhattan needed such as, responsive design, improved translation for their global customer base, and full integration of their CRM and Marketing Automation tools to support the plan for an improved, aggressive digital strategy.

Another important factor behind Manhattan choosing Drupal 8 over 7 was Manhattan’s recognition of the competitive advantage of being right on the leading edge of innovation for Drupal. With the official release of Drupal 8, module development and integration with new technologies will rapidly move to Drupal 8 from 7 and Manhattan Associates will be able to take advantage.

Project Highlights

• Improved navigation, branding, and messaging with a completely custom Drupal 8 theme for Manhattan Associates.
• Full responsive design across all devices by leveraging Drupal 8’s responsive ready capabilities.
• Seamless integration with chosen CRM and marketing automation software to support investment in digital strategy
• Best in class editorial tools for the Manhattan Marketing team to create quality content that will drive business to Manhattan Associates across all devices.
• Contributions to 10+ Drupal 8 core modules from 20+ Mediacurrent team members
• Moving to the Website Operations (WebOps) platform, Pantheon, the Mediacurrent team was able to improve their advanced workflows to deliver on strategic initiatives.

Challenges

Drupal 8 still in Beta: The chief technical challenge of this project is that D8 is still in Beta. Mediacurrent is helping Manhattan Associates navigate those changes by continuing to update the site to the latest beta on an ongoing basis. Manhattan Associates is relying on Mediacurrent’s technical expertise to solve hard problems and keep them updated and online. In order to help with timeline and to better manage risk, Mediacurrent developed a repeatable, predictable upgrade process to manage beta to beta upgrades.

CRM and Marketing Automation: With Google Analytics, Eloqua CRM, and Web-form modules, the site now provides quality metrics on usage and helps facilitate communication between potential customers looking for more information on specific subjects. Mediacurrent updated the Eloqua module for Drupal 8 as well as continued integration, support for capturing form information and gated content. This provided Manhattan Associates the ability to quickly create, review and publish relevant content empowering the marketing team to quickly implement new strategies.

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.

Internationalization: Drupal 6 and 7 are both well-known for their multilingual capabilities, and Drupal 8 has improved on internationalization even further. However, Manhattan Associates had a use case that went beyond Drupal 8's default behavior. By default, if a page is not available in the language being viewed, Drupal will provide the same page in a different language. Manhattan Associates needed to override this behavior to account for things like product availability (e.g., a product offered in one market, the US, and is not available in another market, like France). To address this, Mediacurrent developers wrote a custom module that overrides the default language fallback behavior, allowing Manhattan Associates to only show products in the markets where they are available.

Responsive Design: Manhattan Associates new layout relies heavily on Entity Reference fields and three View Modes for one-, two- and three-column displays. This provides amazingly flexibility for page builders and for the marketing team to create and deliver effective content. On mobile devices, it was important to make components at all three View modes identical to the one-column display, so we used element queries to achieve this. Element queries are like media queries for specific components; They allow us to test the width of a component (rather than the entire viewport) and serve up styles based on that width.

Final Thoughts

With a complete parallel effort of development, theming, content entry and translation all overlapping, the www.manh.com refresh project proved quite challenging. The team helped stretch core Drupal 8 functionality to its limits, but ultimately a robust, global ready website was produced. Drupal 8’s benefits were clear early on, with Core’s Translation capability, improved UI and new OO architecture being clear highlights during the project. The challenge of being an early adopter can be that the technology isn’t 100% complete during implementation. Manhattan Associates trusts Mediacurrent to overcome and mitigate these risks because of our track record during the 4+ year relationship. This allows cutting edge companies like Manhattan Associates to stay ahead of competitors and on the forefront of Drupal technology.