mezcrafts

Executive summary 

With a technical background, the client proposed an efficient solution which was to provide an HTML template to be multiplied for each language and altered manually.

Basically at this point, we had to create 25 HTML files, versions of the same file for each language, and maybe more if any other language will be added.

We considered that this approach will create issues if any of the page components will require modifications. And as any developer knows, there are a lot of stages and change requests and ideas to be applied until a project is over. So the dev team’s choice was to use a template engine, to ease the content input and manipulation, and last but not least to avoid doing the same change in 25 different files.

At its second generation of the eCommerce platform, MEZ Crafts leverages the AWS cloud performance with auto-scaling features, strong security, and full deployment automation.

The client 

The MEZ GmbH (formerly known as EMEA Crafts business of UK headquartered Coats Group) is the leading supplier of textile craft products in Europe, with a history going back over 200 years.

Mez is a partner of Tremend through our long partnership with Coats Group. We implemented and integrated services with Drupal for their 3 CMSs (Schachenmayr US, UK, and DE) and merged the 3 websites into a multi-lingual one.

Business Challenge 

Transforming the company’s online store site to Europe’s knitting go-to destination.

Solution delivered by Tremend 

Tremend could have delivered what the client asked for. We could even build it smarter, and here, the obvious solution would have been using a backend solution (such as a PHP template engine like smarty, twig, etc).
But why not build it even smarter? Due to the short deadline, an idea came to mind, however: by using the handlebars framework, the code could be run in a browser, updated by the customer himself with minimal CSS/HTML knowledge.

AWS deployed solution featuring:

• HA throughout multiple availability zones
• Performance load balancing
• 3rd party integrations (SAP, PIM)
• Cloud resources automated deployment with Terraform & Ansible
• CI/CD in place: Jenkins, AWS CodeDeploy
• Autoscaling
• Monitoring: AWS CloudWatch, Nagios

Implementation

Results 

Fully automated infrastructure and deployment pipelines, for a scalable, high-performance platform.

In the end, the result is what matters: we have a multilingual landing page, using a base template to which we attach components based on each language requirement.
The content is served based on the domain extension using a javascript function to read it (e.g. http://stage.mezcrafts.de/, http://stage.mezcrafts.es/, http://stage.mezcrafts.pt/, http://stage.mezcrafts.it/, etc) and the client can edit the content and page structure in each language file. All js files are merged and minified through a grunt task to save bandwidth. The same thing happens with fewer files, which are merged in a CSS file.