Case Study - A trilingual Drupal build, delivered inside eight weeks
A campaign site in English, French and Japanese, built to a fixed window as the technical delivery team behind a partner agency holding the client relationship.
- Client
- A Canadian federal public sector client
- Year
- Service
- Enterprise Website Builds
Overview
Multilingual is where this kind of build usually slips. English, French and Japanese is not three times the work of one language. It changes how content types, fields and templates have to be structured from the start, and retrofitting it is considerably worse than planning for it.
What we did
We put in a Drupal lead for architecture, module selection and localisation strategy, two site builders and themers for component development and QA, and a technical project manager for oversight and sprint planning.
Localisation was configured up front, before the English site was built out on its own. The build leaned on site-building and theming over custom code, which keeps it maintainable for whoever picks it up next. Effort was weighted towards the start, on architecture and localisation setup, because those are the decisions that are expensive to revisit.
Design and component counts were still being finalised while the build ran, so we worked to the partner's evolving scope rather than a frozen specification.
The outcome
The site shipped inside the projected six to eight week window, multilingual across all three languages, built from reusable components. The partner kept the client relationship and the strategic work. We handled Drupal delivery and multilingual complexity.