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How Arduino sped up their educational projects

The world’s famous hardware and software company needed a new content architecture to manage its fast-growing educational products. Since the collaboration with Cantiere Creativo, Arduino can create and manage new products faster.

Arduino numbers

-95.2%

fewer lines of code

-50%

average loading time

+52.3%

faster than the industry average

More content produced in less time

The new architecture allows Arduino teams to create new sites and contents modularly, replicating the common parts without any effort.

Faster loading times across the board

The new project websites perform significantly better than the industry standard. 

Simplified editorial workflow

The editorial team can work collaboratively with the development team without fear of something breaking.

Thanks to the flexibility of the platform and the good support from Cantiere Creativo, it was easy to integrate the mockups created by our design team, customizing the platform according to our needs

Ernesto López Canelon

Product owner | Arduino

Escape from a monolithic architecture

Arduino needed to improve the content management of the Educational section and all of its related products because the old monolithic CMS anchored them to use a slow editorial workflow. When creating new websites, the development and editorial team found themselves having to recreate content and pages from scratch, with a significant waste of time.
Their goal was to switch to a CMS that would allow them to replicate sites and content with ease, maintaining excellent performance without sacrificing security. For this reason, they decided to choose a headless CMS.

Looking for an experienced digital partner

Headless CMSs represent a growing market because it's a technology that offers the ability to manage content in a central hub. It is also API-centered so that teams can work with their favourite development languages. The only difficulty is to find an agency capable of working on an architecture that is still little explored in the mainstream.
After evaluating DatoCMS as a technological solution, Arduino contacted LeanPanda because it is the agency where the product was born years ago.
The elastic nature of DatoCMS and the experience of Cantiere Creativo would have allowed Arduino to work on content architecture and at the same time develop the interface within a reasonable time, considerably improving the workflow.

A fast and clean system

Cantiere Creativo has developed a system that combines top-shelf speed to greater efficiency and cleanliness.
The average load times for the homepage is 2.4 seconds, 2,1 seconds less than the educational sector average. Still, it is the navigation speed of the internal pages that have shown the most significant qualitative leap.
The old system needed up to 8 seconds for each internal page to open, while the new structure leads to almost instantaneous loads, measurable in milliseconds.
Considerable optimisation work has been done, going from 26,107 lines of code of the old version to just 1,267 lines, with a codebase saving of 95.2%.

DatoCMS + React

A first project has been created using DatoCMS and React so that it can then be used as a basis for other projects, "duplicating" the parts that are shared between them.
React allows you to be show content much faster because it does it smartly, loading only the interface parts that change from one page to another.
The language is very modular, so it is easy to disassemble and reassemble at will, offering multiple solutions with small minor changes.
Like React, DatoCMS also makes flexibility its strong point, thanks to the Modular Blocks that allow you to create modular types of content that can be positioned at will in the structure of a page and reused wherever you want.
“Due to the flexibility of the platform and the good support, it has been possible to integrate the mockups made by our design team in an easy way, customising the platform to our needs” says Ernesto López Canelón,  Hardware Designer and Product Owner at Arduino. 
DatoCMS also allows rigorous validations so that the editorial team can work on the contents without fear of breaking something after the publication of new content.

Training and Workshop

Arduino was enthusiastic about the product, but the team initially found it challenging to insert content correctly. After a shared analysis of the difficulties, the CTO and the LeanPanda project manager flew to the two European headquarters of Arduino (Malmö and Turin) for four days of training, as well as a workshop designed to optimise work.
“Initially the onboarding process was a bit of a challenge for the team, but after the training sessions and the constant support from LeanPanda we are now much more confident working with DatoCMS and more aware of its potential”, says Carla Muñoz Sedze, Arduino CTC GO! Product Owner.
The workshop was also a moment of confrontation and listening so that the relationship with Arduino did not stop at the content architecture alone.
Having a physical venue to bounce opinions off of one another has risen new ideas that were not even contemplated at the beginning:
  • a plugin for DatoCMS that translates content automatically, interfacing with multiple translation systems like Yandex and Transifex.
  • an automatic Markdown linter that checks (based on the customer's needs) how the content has been entered and, eventually, corrects it.

    A relationship that goes beyond maintenance

    Arduino and Cantiere Creativo continue to collaborate on various projects, including plugins designed during the four days of training.

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