Life In The Drop - A Year In the Life of a Real Enterprise Drupal 8 Website

In early 2015 Mediacurrent and Manhattan Associates launched one of the world’s first enterprise Drupal 8 websites (www.manh.com). As an early adopter of Drupal 8, we worked almost exclusively with Drupal core and gained valuable insight into how we can use core to deliver a fully featured CMS experience.

One year later, Drupal 8 has a stable release and the contrib community is delivering more functionality with new or updated contributed modules to leverage and improve on Drupal 8. In this talk we will take a deep dive into the strengths and weaknesses of actual day to day ownership of Drupal 8 *right now*. We will also examine how Manhattan Associates and Mediacurrent worked together to incorporate the latest Drupal contribute advances, and mitigate issues inherent with being an early adopter.

Topics Covered

• Overview of Drupal 8 at time of build and launch.

• Day to Day usage of Drupal 8 by site builders and content editors.

• Editorial and Page Building Tools

• Internationalization

• Marketing Automation and Eloqua in Drupal 8

• Realistic Cost of Ownership for early adopters.

• Lessons Learned

• Q/A

Who should attend:

• Non Technical decision makers who are trying to understand what the real life working benefits and challenges are in Drupal 8.

• Developers, Architects and Site Builders looking to understand how first generation Drupal 8 websites are being built and maintained.

• Anyone who is curious about what day to day life is like working with Drupal 8 for an enterprise level site.

About James

As Director of Client Services James is responsible for client satisfaction and project success across all of our projects. James works closely with clients to ensure our solutions align with their business needs and to keep clients informed of all of our service offerings that are relevant to their requirements.

Previously James worked as a Lead Drupal Architect where he lead the redevelopment of Manhattan Associates flagship website into a fully translated Drupal 6 site serving hundreds of resources in over six languages. He also worked as part of Mediacurrent team that migrated Georgia.gov and all Georgia Technology Authority websites from a proprietary CMS to Drupal 7, personally handling the migration of Georgia.gov data. James was also an integral part of the team that migrated weather.com to Drupal 7, helping to launch the highest trafficked Drupal site in the world. Before Mediacurrent James worked as the Lead Application Developer at Georgia Public Broadcasting where he led the enterprise-level conversion of www.gpb.org from a Java based custom content management system (CMS) to Drupal 5, and was instrumental in helping double the annual traffic from 750,000 unique visitors to 1.59 million.

As a consultant, James has worked extensively with Drupal for over 8 years. He is well-versed in all aspects of the Drupal site build-out process, including but not limited to: site architecture documentation, module development, theming, and project management. James has extensive team leading experience and has helped a cross-section of clients with strategic planning, and understanding how they can best leverage Drupal to meet their business objectives.

About Will

Will is Principal Web Developer for Manhattan Associates and serves as the in-house Drupal expert and web developer. He manages over 20 customer-facing websites for Manhattan Associates and is responsible for all aspects of the digital marketing platform from infrastructure and hosting, to hands-on site building and development, and project and vendor management.

Prior to working at Manhattan Associates, Will was a freelance web developer and focused on creating digital solutions for small businesses and nonprofits. He has almost 10 years of Drupal experience as a site builder, developer, and project manager.

In his pre-web developer career, Will was a retail site selection consultant and helped Starbucks determine where to locate their stores. Will was also co-founder of award-winning music and culture publication, Paste Magazine. Will is passionate about using technology to assist companies with their business problems.