PopCap Games
Custom Drupal and Magento Website
In early 2010, video game publisher PopCap Games had outgrown their content management system. The company—responsible for casual gaming hits like Bejeweled, Plants vs. Zombies, and Bookworm—had built their CMS in-house. As they expanded, the effort required to use and maintain a homegrown CMS began to wear on both their content team and their developers.
As PopCap’s business grew, their CMS could not keep pace with the increased demand. Adding new content to the site involved a multi-stage, multi-person process to generate flat HTML files. Every update to site content or media files required a complete code push. In addition, because they’d built the CMS from scratch, the developers were on their own when it came to addressing problems. A huge percentage of their time was devoted to tracking and fixing bugs.
When PopCap came to us, they needed a development partner to help them identify and implement a new CMS that could relieve the burden on their content and development teams and help the business unblock the content creation process.
Scoping a CMS Strategy
When Bear Group came on board, our first step was a scoping phase. We worked with a large group of PopCap stakeholders to identify and prioritize their CMS needs. One of the most important requirements was that their new CMS could run beneath their heavily branded front end. The versatility and power of the Drupal framework made it a good fit, and we got to work building their new site.
Greater Flexibility With Tighter Integrations
Popcap’s two big pain points—the clunky publishing process and the high cost of maintenance—were immediately resolved. Drupal’s user-friendly interface, live and scheduled publishing options, and built-in version control gave the content team all the flexibility and control they were after. And with Drupal’s active developer community, PopCap’s internal development team was no longer working to maintain their core systems in a vacuum.
Migrating PopCap.com
We transitioned the entire PopCap.com site—in five languages—over to the Drupal platform. The project included custom themes, module development, and extensive content migration. We worked with PopCap to relaunch their support site using Drupal and the Apache Solr search platform.
Upgrades
Redesign of the front-end to deliver a richer user experience.
Updated Magento® API's to for a tighter integration with Drupal.
Ongoing Development
During that initial engagement with PopCap, we served as an accelerator, providing a dedicated team of developers and project managers to get the new site built and launched as quickly as possible. After a successful launch, Bear Group stayed on as a development partner.