A technically challenging project

A global leader in testing and assessment solutions, Prometric was using a legacy Drupal content management system (CMS) that had been customized many times over the years as the company expanded and diversified. The result: a CMS with mismatched and misaligned components that didn’t work very well with each other, and an overall online presence that lacked a cohesive look and feel. The company needed a new, modern website, but still had to keep many of the pages and data from their existing site.

Craft&Crew handled the strategy, UX and design for the new site, and entrusted Aurora to manage the dev program as well as the website build and migration.

Scope

Prometric’s new website involved 18 unique page designs, Salesforce integration for contact forms along with Salesforce API integration to provide exam-takers with daily updates about temporary closures of in-person test centres, and the migration of more than 500 existing pages.

On top of that, the entire site needed automated translation capabilities but with the ability for manual override for up to 23 languages, as the company operates in markets all over the world. Those multilingual requirements played a key role in Prometric’s decision to move away from Drupal and toward CraftCMS.

Prototyping

Given the complexity of the project, Aurora started by creating prototype migration scripts. Aurora also worked with Craft&Crew to identify an existing platform that could be implemented and configured to work with the site’s many different language requirements.

Ultimately, custom migration scripts were created and the ContentBuddy plug-in was used for the translation and multilingual support, leveraging OpenAI as the translation tool. 

CMS Build

Although CraftCMS was chosen to replace Drupal, Prometric wanted the input fields of the CMS modules to be as similar as possible to Drupal to minimize the amount of training their team would need to use the new system. This added additional complexity to the project as some out-of-the-box labels and fields had to be modified.

However, the true complexity came with configuring ContentBuddy and OpenAI into CraftCMS so each page could be automatically translated into numerous languages. This posed many technical challenges that required significant testing and troubleshooting in collaboration with the developer of ContentBuddy.

Migration

The total scope of the migration included more than 300 pages for the “exams” section of the site as well as 200+ blogs and other resources. As part of the migration, Aurora had to take the export files from Drupal and then map them to the new fields in CraftCMS.

Each exam page has different content, including dynamic content. In some cases, that included links to external systems that required passing a query string to ensure the correct URL was being used. In other cases, these links went to other systems or were just static links. As a result, the migration scripts were complex, with their behaviour dictated by numerous different flags.

To further complicate things, because every exam page was slightly different, the page designs had to be able to account for the dynamic content by removing certain modules altogether or changing column settings, for example.

Once all the pages were migrated, they then needed to be translated into the multiple required languages, with each exam possibly having different languages.

Integrations

Prometric’s legacy site included a section that showed a list of all the in-person test centres that were temporarily closed. This was a highly manual process, with a web admin having to update the list every day based on what they were seeing in Salesforce.

For the new website, Aurora was tasked with dynamically pulling test centre closure notifications from a report in Salesforce, then manipulating that data to link together some fields, divide others and reformat the columns to fit the design of the new site.

In addition, many different contact forms across the Prometric site were integrated with Salesforce via the Formie plug-in. After encountering some integration issues based on the setup of the Salesforce instance, Aurora had to coordinate with the plug-in developer to troubleshoot and ultimately resolve the issue.

Outcomes

Despite the scale and technical complexity of the project, the new Prometric website went live in late 2024. During the two-week warranty period, there were no high-severity application-level issues — a testament to the quality of the build.

Website can be found at prometric.com