By Janus Boye
As a large, global and complex organisation working with consumer goods, how do you both consolidate your brand websites and make it easy to create new ones? In particular, when brand management is distributed globally and websites developed by different teams in different countries, things can quickly get both painstakingly expensive and to put it mildly tricky to manage.
French-based global spirits company Pernod Ricard was facing exactly this challenge 2 years ago and looking for a content management system that they could use and scale to meet their requirements.
London-based Ian Stanton joined Pernod Ricard as CMS Global Platform Lead in September 2019. With a 12-years digital agency background, Ian brought extensive experience and recently shared their story with our CMS Expert community. It’s a story about working together as a team, selecting the right platform, working with agencies, headless considerations and much more.
Selecting the right platform
At the onset of the project, the project team had to make two key tool decisions:
A single CMS to match all the different requirements?
Which platform(s) to base their work on?
Let’s start with the decision for one or multiple tools. Today, many organisations have multiple tools with the pros/cons that come with a mixed setup. On the other hand, ideally, a single digital platform enables focus on common functional and non-functional website requirements.
Pernod Richard quickly decided to go for a single system. To quote Ian:
Selecting a single CMS is all about transferable skills and shared learnings. In particular, as people frequently move around brands. In addition, a single CMS is a key to confidence in being able to produce group-wide web-based objectives that can be easily executed across any brand website within the group
Before embarking on the project, Pernod Ricard’s websites lay across four major content management systems:
a custom Symfony-based content management system that had been built by one of the brand groups
Drupal
Episerver
In addition, there were also a few non-CMS websites.
Hosting was managed within Pernod Ricard’s Pantheon or AWS ecosystem, or externally via third party hosting solutions.
After some internal deliberation, WordPress came out the winner, mostly due to lower cost and the long list of available agencies with WordPress experience.
For secure hosting, Pantheon was selected to provide Pernod Ricard websites with an element of out of the box security by default, already packaged up and ready to go.
As Ian said in our peer group meeting:
WordPress was chosen due to its suitability for the broad spectrum of development teams that work for us, which span from individual freelancers, internal multi-stack development teams and integrated agencies. WordPress is accessible to that full spectrum of teams and is flexible in the manner in which it can be deployed; being malleable to the development styles and techniques of the team that leverage it.
Making it work
With a decision to go with WordPress, Pernod Ricard could move on fleshing out the 5 key deliverables:
A framework and a technical architecture
Good practices for WordPress
Responsible use of plugins
Hosting
Security best practices
Pernod Ricard partnered with a France-based WordPress-specialised development agency called Expertime Open, with which they had an existing relationship. This team focused on building Pernod Ricard-centric plugins, each representing a different functional or non-functional feature set. Some plugins were co-developed, whilst others were fully developed by the partner.
To quote Ian
A key objective for the platform was to be flexible to different development styles. Our wish for our platform is that it would be an enabler and accelerator that could allow popular development styles. We did not want to be in a situation where the platform was unpopular amongst the plethora of development agencies and teams that work for us globally
Initially, there was a huge appetite to build plugins. With the overall goal being to make it cheaper and faster for different agencies to build Pernod Ricard websites, custom plugins were created on topics such as security, translation and optimisation.
Reflecting on the deployment, Ian delivered a memorable one-liner in our call:
Many things sound like good ideas, but don’t really work in practice
One of the key objectives of the platform was to facilitate multi-market localisation of brand websites and to enable individual markets to manage their own content within the main brand website. This was developed through the utilisation of existing functionality in a community plugin named WPML. Ian and his team at Pernod Ricard took this plugin and extended it with supplementary plugins for their own unique requirements, including a workflow with a pre-existing translation partner to produce a translation and localisation process.
Today, all brand websites now follow the same process of localisation, and can either choose to self-translate content, or integrate with our human-based translation partner. To quote Ian:
This consistent approach with localisation, which is such a big aspect of our work in website management, is reflected across much of our solution. The process for all websites is the same, which means that as a group, we can accumulate experience and skill in the system, which is transferable across all of our brands and markets.
Learn more about complex CMS deployments
For another case study, I’ve previously written about how SFMOMA Selected Kentico Kontent To Separate Content From Code.
Headless is a big thing at the moment. You can also read the notes from another CMS Expert call on The Hurdles To Headless CMS Adoption - And How To Overcome Them.