Building a multilingual & multi-country e-commerce site with Drupal 7

1. MULTINATIONAL & MULTILINGUAL
REUSABLE E-COMMERCE
PLATFORM
CASE STUDY

2. MaximeTopolov, @mtopolov
CTO & Co-Founder of @Adyax
Arthur Murauskas,
Associate Director & Drupal Architect @Adyax

3. OBJECTIVES

4. http://www.guerlain.com/int/en-int

5. http://www.makeupforever.com/us/en-us

6. An e-commerce site connected to SAP
with rich editorial content,
managing multiple countries and languages,
where each country is independent,
where the content must be validated by France
except some...
Fluid front-end, that must work with IE6...
Guerlain

7. Make Up For Ever
An e-commerce ready site that will be connected
to Biz-Talk with rich editorial content,
managing multiple countries and languages,
where each country is independent,
where the content must be validated by France
easy, right?
Full responsive with IE7 support
LOTS of huge HD images

8. KEY NUMBERS

9. 2,500
16
25
2ERP, INCLUDING SAP
COUNTRIES, INCLUDING CHINA
LANGUAGES,
INCLUDING JAPANESE
PRODUCT REFERENCES

10. 70
12
15
15,000 MAN HOURS
MONTHS OF DEVELOPMENT
PEOPLE
TEMPLATES 57CONTENTTYPES

11. BASICTECHNIQUES

13. Main features
A single Drupal instance for all the sites.
Site launch is progressive, country by country.
Export and import of content in Excel format.
Certain sites will be e-commerce, others won’t.
Robust translation and publication workflow with alerts.

15. COUNTRIES & LANGUAGES

16. CANADA
FRANCE
SPAIN
CHINA
FR2 EN
FR3
ES
CN
SWITZERLAND FR1 IT DE

17. Country Country code Language Language code
International in EN int English en
France fr French fr
US us English US en-us
UK uk English UK en-uk
Middle-East me English Middle East en-me
China cn Chinese zh
Hong Kong hk Chinese zh-hk
English en-hk
Spain es Spain es
Canada ca Canadian French fr-ca
Canadian English en-ca
Russia ru Russian ru
Korea ko Korean kr
Taiwan tw Simplified Chinese zh-tw
Japan jp Japanese ja
Brazil br Brazilian Portuguese pt
Italy it Italian it
Germany ge German de

18. Management of languages based on several very
standard Drupal modules:
Localization Client (i10n_client)
TranslationTemplate Extractor (potx)
EntityTranslation (entity_translation)

19. Why entity_translation?
It’s logical :)
There are no “duplicate” translation nodes
Entity translation is in D8 Core
Not all the fields should be translated

21. Three features were essential:
1
2
3
A ‘central’ country where all original
content is first created
Possibility of copying all content of
one language to another
Notification of countries in case of
modification of any content in the
‘central’ country

22. Each country can be identified either by its
domain (guerlain.co.uk), or by a URL key
(guerlain.com/fr)
OK, but what is a country?
Each country has specific settings, admin users

23. The Domain Access module (domain) offers
this feature on a platter.

24. Copy and pre-fill translations from source
Copy structure: menu, taxonomy, etc

27. EN-EN
EN-US EN-CA FR-FR
FR-BE

29. No revisions (btw, entity_translation do not
support them). Country editors are responsible
and have two versions at their disposal (draft &
published)

31. Content workflow

32. When we say “content translation gets published”, it means:
• Original language / Central: content is available for the
Countries' local translations;
• Country local languages: content translation is available online
for the website users.
Translation workflow

33. Problem 1: customisation of forms (contact us,
newsletter) according to countries.
Problem 2: difficulties with interface translation

34. Take-home message:
Building the best possible, scalable multilanguage-
multicountry perfect solution, with overrides,
notifications, permissions and complex workflow
works fine but IS NOT USED.
!
Client wants less features and a simple workflow,
even if it requires more manual work from their
contributors.

35. GEOLOCATION

36. Guerlain.com/es Guerlain.com/fr
CDN
VARNISH
NGNIX
Guerlain.comJS
MaxMind

38. IMPORT / EXPORT of content

39. Import of Products & SKUs with their Media
Import of Categories
Import of Stores

40. The Excel 97 - Excel 2003 Binary file format (BIFF8)
We tried many formats to support XLS, one that
works with common PHP libs in most of cases is :
Feeds used to import data.

43. SKUs as well as products could have multiple
photos, so we also have:
!
A ZIP archive with media organized into folders
product/product-ID/xxxxx.jpeg
or sku/sku-ID/xxxxx.jpeg

46. ERP INTEGRATION

47. Orders,Clients
SKUs,Stock,
OrderStatus
XML
SOAP

48. Working with SAP is not complicated, but
laborious. One order can be 5000 lines of
XML

49. We have created a tool to send an XML
command to SAP, directly from the Drupal
back-office
!
In addition, we have put into place a log of
each communication (to & from) SAP that is
visible from the objects concerned
(command, user, SKU)

52. SSL

53. !
Setup of the Secure Pages
module
!
Creation of the sub-domain
wws
!
SSL = User Data (Cart, My-
Account)
CDN
VARNISH
NGNIX
DRUPAL
Secure Pages

54. Secure vs insecure / http vs https
!
Start development with activating all https
support. Define https urls at the very
beginning! Do think about cross-site scripting
and AJAX if urls differ. Secured cookies.
!
Idea: start thinking secure from the beginning
of every project.

55. SMOOTH FRONT-END

60. OOOOOPTIMIZATIONS

61. CDN
VARNISH
NGNIX
DRUPAL
ESI
BLOCS JS
STATIC.GUERLAIN.COM
MEMCACHE
ENTITY CACHE VIEWS CACHE

62. Never underestimate performance tuning.
!
Start first Sprint by activating all performance
related modules - memcache, entity-cache,
adv-agg,Varnish/purge, etc.
!
Test your deliveries with all those that have
been activated, measure load/server responses
starting from Sprint 1, force your teams to
develop in a performance-oriented way.
!
Idea: Ecommerce is performance-oriented
development.

63. From re-use to platform
makeupforever.com

64. Countries, Languages, Multi-site system:
Re-use of modules
!
Import/Export,Workflow: partial re-use
!
ERP: connectors to SAP or JDEdwards
may be partially exchanged
!
Same platform: features may be
exchanged

65. WHY DRUPAL?

66. Open Source, with the largest community in the
world = no lock down
!
20,000 existing and modules = maintainable
!
Robust and tested: 13 years,White House,The
Economist, BBC,Warner…
!
Flexible: How to’s, UGC, video sections,
personalization, engraving, community, academy,
mini-sites…

67. Number one (or two ;)
Drupal Shop in EMEA

68. Thanks !You can
download slides of
this presentation
on slideshare !
OR
Throw us
rotten
tomates !
@Adyax