Acronis International

Projects goals and specifics

The rise of virtualization, the explosion of data creation and the opportunities in Cloud services are bringing new challenges to maintaining effective backup and disaster recovery programs for critical data.

Acronis can help you securely migrate, protect and recover critical data wherever it resides in your physical, virtual or cloud environments. With a Unified Platform and new generation technology, its innovative solutions are designed to ease the management burden and reduce a total cost of ownership while improving your recovery time objectives.

1. Over 175,000 customers in a broad range of industries have chosen Acronis to protect their business continuity
2. Strong partner ecosystem reaches customers in more than 90 countries all around the world
3. Through their award winning customer support centers, Acronis offers 24/7 assistance to their customers worldwide

Why Drupal was chosen

After an extensive research, Drupal was chosen as the most powerful and flexible platform because of its complex content structure, administration resources, and lots of professionally-made modules. And, of course, it’s open source.

Content Structure

There are more than 20 products for different purposes, and many products can be used with the cloud storage system. Also, there are a lot of options of purchasing each product. All these varieties are handled by the standard Drupal content types system as well as it could be.

Multilingual

Acronis website is multilingual. It supports about 10 languages for more than 20 countries/regions. We use the Entity Translation and customized TMGMT modules to satisfy translators needs. Each region has a special product price and currency. Some content/products are restricted to different locations.

Flexible Product promotions

From time to time, Acronis team arranges promotions for their products with great bonuses and discounts. These promotions are specific for different regions and are active only for a certain period. We’ve designed a flexible and convenient system to manage these promotions. We have a special content type. These content type nodes connect to an appropriate node to replace fields with new values like a new price. After promo is over, special nodes get removed and we see our product just as they were before. No extra actions needed.

Site Administration

We should notice that the Acronis team is really big and experienced. There are content managers team, translators team, SEO team, promo team, and others. And all of them need to change content quickly and easily. Each action is being kept in the Drupal history with the possibility to check who did what and when. Also, it’s possible to move between revisions quickly if something went wrong. The Workbench moderation module fits these purposes as well as possible. We used the Nodeblock module to convert static blocks to nodes. This way we received revisions functionality even for our block.

Adaptive Theme

In the end we should say a word about the theme. We are proud to present a highly flexible, adaptive theme for the Acronis website. It supports desktop screens, tablets, and smartphones. All the actions that can be done with a mouse and a keyboard can also be done with touchscreen. The Adaptive theme is used as a base for our theme solution.

For some design solutions we used HTML5 and CSS3 features. For older browsers, which don’t support HTML5 and CSS3, layouts might differ.

We support all modern browsers including IE 8+.

Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment

We move updates to Acronis website almost every day. It’s really a rapidly changing system. We use the Continuous Integration process based on Jenkins to be always sure the system works fine with each commit to the code repository. We use the Coder module to check code style, the PHP mess detector, and the copy-paste detector. Selenium tests are being run on each commit. Phing is being used to deploy updates between dev servers, stage, and production as easily as it’s possible.

Performance

As a server solution we use Linux OS with nginx as the server application. This configuration itself gives great performance results. But we also use the powerful cache system which caches almost every page on the website. We are lucky to have the most users as anonymous so cache solution works perfectly here.

Key modules/theme/distribution used

• Display Suite
• Features
• Context
• Workbench
• Workbench Moderation
• Views
• Wysiwyg
• Translation Management Tool
• Nodeblock
• Meta tags quick
• Language Hierarchy

Custom code

We did quite a lot of customization in the translation process. TMGMT was chosen as a base for our translation module. We have added very useful filters to choose the whole content from one page at once (all blocks, nodes being used in views) to create a job to translate the page.

Also, we’ve added a possibility to reimport jobs if needed (by default TMGMT doesn’t allow to reimport jobs).

What's more, the translation_access module was created to control the visibility of Drupal nodes based on a user’s current language. This way some products are allowed to be seen only by Japanese, for example.

In conclusion

We are very proud of our collaboration with the Acronis team. We are sure together we’ve managed to create a powerful and stable solution. We hope our cooperation will last for many years!