Leica Geosystems: Multilingual E-commerce

Feeling the Pain-points with Multisite

Leica’s e-commerce store is active in multiple countries and languages. Managing content in a multisite environment meant managing multiple sites. Product, content, and price changes were difficult. It was Oomph’s challenge to make content and product management easier for the Leica team as well as support the ability to create new country sites on demand. Leica’s new e-commerce site needed to support:

10 Countries plus a Global Region

Six Languages

and Many 3rd Party integrations

The pain points of the previous Multisite architecture were that each country was a silo:

• No Single Sign On (SSO): Multiple admin log-ins to remember
• Repetitive updates: Running Drupal’s update script on every site and testing was a lengthy process
• Multiple stores: Multiple product lists, product features, and prices
• Multiple sites to translate: each site was sent individually to be translated into one language

Creating a Singularity with Drupal 8, Domain Access, & Drupal Commerce

A move to Drupal 8 in combination with some smart choices in module support and customization simplified many aspects of the Leica team’s workflow, including:

• Configuration management: Drupal 8’s introduction of configuration management in core means that point-and-click admin configuration can get exported from one environment and imported into another, syncing multiple environments and saving configuration in our code repository
• One Database to Rule Them All: Admins have a single site to log into and do their work, and developers have one site to update, patch, and configure
• One Commerce Install, Multiple stores: There is one Drupal Commerce 2.x install with multiple stores with one set of products. Each product has the ability to be assigned to multiple stores, and price lists per country control product pricing
• One Page in Multiple Countries and Multiple Languages: The new single site model gives a piece of content one place to live, while authors can control which countries the content is available and the same content is translated into all the languages available once.
• Future proof: With a smooth upgrade path into Drupal 9 in 2020, the Drupal 8 site gives Leica more longevity in the Drupal ecosystem

From more detailed information about how Oomph leveraged the Domain Access, Country Path, Commerce, and Commerce Store Domain modules, Oomph’s Senior Drupal Architect and the project’s lead developer, John Picozzi, conducted a talk for Drupal GovCon all about it.

Building the Relationship to go Further

Oomph and Leica have been working together for over six years. One of the things that keeps the Leica team coming back is our willingness to constantly optimize, support changes in 3rd party integrations, and strategize on which new features to add from the backlog. Leica understands that while major initiatives might reset the foundation, a great website is never done.

The willingness of the Drupal community to support the needs of this project cannot be overlooked, either. Oomph has been able to leverage our team’s commitment to open source contributions to get other developers to add features to the modules they support. Without the give and take of the community and our commitment to give back, many modifications and customizations for this project would have been much more difficult. The team at Centarro, maintainers of the Commerce module, were fantastic to work with and we thank them.

We look forward to continuing to support Leica Geosystems and their product line worldwide. With a smooth upgrade path to Drupal 9 in 2020, the site is ready for the next big upgrade.