Drupal 8 Development for The Carlyle Group

GOALS

Carlyle wanted the same design and theme as their current Drupal 6 site, but with increased functionality. A huge emphasis was put on ensuring ease-of-use for editing site content because Carlyle's team is large, with numerous different roles; there are content managers, translators, marketers and site administrators, all of whom need the ability to change content quickly and easily, while also having appropriate permission to be able to perform actions for only the specific needs of their role.

Our main goal was to simplify the content authoring experience while reducing site complexity. To enhance the content authoring workflow we ensured pieces of dynamic content are reusable and adaptable.

Other goals included:

• Migrate over 20,000 pieces of content
• Drag and drop information on the homepage
• Ability to edit all content and menus
• 3 languages (English, Japanese and Chinese)
• SEO integration
• Ability to change and customize page layouts

OUTCOME:

Multilingual

Drupal 8's multilingual core offers a robust multilingual foundation, making the integration process much more seamless, especially for an enterprise-level business like Carlyle.

Our custom homepage layout module, Build Lab, allows for enhanced flexibility and customization. This robust module gives admin the ability to change homepage layouts of not only its primary site — but also its multilingual counterparts.

Ability to Customize Homepage Layouts

Carlyle is a worldwide leader for financial asset management. Because of their prestigious reputation they attract clients from all around the globe, many of whom are looking for the latest updates on Carlyle’s acquisitions and investments.

This lends the foundation for large traffic with an insatiable appetite for content, which is why Carlyle creates and publishes hundreds of stories, videos, and photo galleries per year with many that get picked up by major TV networks, newspapers, and financial publications like the Washington Post.

For this reason, Carlyle needed a flexible homepage grid that could be customized, easily, on a weekly basis by dragging and dropping new content. To solve this we created a custom drag and drop administration system, Build Lab (entity-component grid system). This unique module allowed the Carlyle team to customize their homepage layouts on their main site, as well as the Chinese and Japanese sites.

Build Lab is a product that aims to provide a simplified yet flexible content-authoring experience for Drupal.

With Build Lab your pages are made up of various components of different types, both reusable and unique, that you place on the page using a drag-and-drop system that allows for easy repositioning and resizing of elements. Pages are created from a set of flexible layouts chosen based on the needs of your site. With build lab you can easily create, modify, and position components on pages in an intuitive, visual manner.

Content Types

Carlyle has a large team with 35 offices in 21 countries on six continents, so an intuitive and simple backend was a priority. We eliminated backend complexity by reducing content types from 46 to 10, which wasn’t easy to map as a large volume of content in the initial content types was hard coded.

Our North Studio team created a data hierarchy for the content types starting with Asset Classes, and enabled different content types to be labeled to allow ease-of-use when adding new content.

All of this content not only had to be easy to publish, but also easy to find. The Drupal 6 site relied primarily on panels, which meant site content was not search-indexable. Our focus was to organize the content in an intuitive way, while also keyword-optimizing pages to garner the highest SEO-value.

Migration

With our framework in place, the next technical hurdle was moving 20,000+ pieces of content and 4,000+ nodes into the new site. To make things even more complicated, all this content also had a Chinese and Japanese translation that needed to also be migrated. Not a quick task by any means.

We needed to come up with a programmatic solution to map out all content, to maximize our time and efficiency. Also, at the time of this project, migration of translations had not been implemented in core.

Our agile team was able to write custom migrations for the parent node and its translation - by making the translation migration dependent on the parent node migration, so we guaranteed things were created in the right order, and unorganized files were put into nice neat file entities.

Final Result:

• Custom, responsive theme development that features stunning widescreen imagery
• Eliminated backend complexity by reducing content types from 46 to 10
• Ability for admins to customize homepage layouts
• Simplified content authoring workflow
• Multilingual, custom capabilities (English, Chinese, Japanese)
• Premium user experience (UX) through extensive quality assurance testing
• Integrated with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager
• Improved site search feature
• Seamless migration of 20,000+ pieces of content and 4,000+ nodes
• Robust, intuitive backend that has been through several rounds of code reviews