Summary

British Land PLC owns and manages commercial property worth £17.1 ($28) billion. With a vast portfolio of 40 shopping malls in the UK, achieved mostly via acquisition, this FTSE 100 company faced considerable publishing challenges arising from inheriting multiple legacy web sites.

Like many enterprises British Land had multiple stakeholders, huge volumes of content, many CMSs and tight deadlines. This is the story of how Drupal came to the rescue.

Linsey Wooldridge, Retail Marketing Director at British Land will co-present

Principle objectives

CTI were commissioned to develop a platform which enabled British Land to efficiently distribute content enterprise wide.

The solution needed to accomodate malls having varied size and web site requirements.

British Land sought to enhance their relationship with major retailer tenants by streamlining the process of publishing brand marketing via "BLISS".

The 40 web sites were to be rolled out in rapid succession to satisfy commercial pressures.

The solution

Enterprise CMS

• Central Hub site and 40 subscriber mall sites
• Novel implementation of Drupal features to create an 'App Store'
• Enterprise wide publishing from central interface using REST / JSON

BLISS Retailer system

The BLISS system is a central hub site which all mall sites subscribe to for content.

• Administrators centrally manage retailer logos, brand identity and visual assets which are syndicated to mall sites.
• Retailer head office staff access a private "News Wire" service which empowers them to distribute marketing messages to malls in which they have a presence.

Mall Drupal sites

• Customisation of theme fonts, colour schemes and imagery at local level - using Sass and Colour Module
• Degree of content autonomy at local site level
• The "App Store" allowed British Land to maintain sites which had varying degrees of features. It provided non technical mall managers freedom to provision site features with ease
• Integration to multiple cinema APIs for film listings, special offers APIs to incentivise consumers

In this session you will learn

• How we delivered 40 sites in 40 days
• The importance of documentation, planning and project managers for enterprise projects. Client and agency perspective
• How we used Drupal to meet the publishing needs of a vast organisation
• Content distribution models available to Drupal, what pitfalls exist
• How we built an "App Store" using available contrib modules (and features on steroids)
• Our epic fails and wins - warts and all

About the speaker

Paul Johnson is a highly active member of the Drupal community, supporting the Drupal Association in a voluntary capacity in relation to marketing and social media. He has organised several Drupal events, camps and helps with the North West Drupal user Group.

In a professional capacity he is a director of CTI Digital and has overall responsibility for all aspects of Drupal in what is one of the UK's largest and most experienced delivery teams. CTI work with enterprise clients such as Travelodge and Adidas, in media for The BBC and Channel 4 , government clients include The NHS and The British Council.