The need for an elastic content platform

Arduino was looking for a solution to enhance the user experience of the Educational branch of their business because their old traditional web content management platform with coupled architectures was failing to meet the needs of their team.

The old monolithic CMS did not allow to go on the market with new educational products in a short time, because the editorial and development teams were practically forced to start from scratch every time they wanted to add a new property. Not only the work done on previous projects could not be properly, but the constant fiddling on the frontend caused codebase bloat.

The performance also started to be a problem: while project homepages could load rather quickly, internal pages could take as long as eight seconds.

Arduino needed scalability, first-of-the-class performances, and a solution that could easily spin up multiple sites in a matter of days.

With all that in mind, they found DatoCMS to be the best-fit solution to take their content infrastructure to the next level.

A solution-driven agency enters the fray

For such a radical change, Arduino decided to rely on the experience of an external team. The choice fell on Cantiere Creativo, the tech agency where DatoCMS took its first steps as a product.

"Generally, we prefer to talk about solutions before technology stacks, but in this case, DatoCMS was what Arduino exactly needed," said Matteo Manzo, Cantiere Creativo technical project manager.

The API-first nature of DatoCMS has allowed Cantiere Creativo to choose the right language for Arduino's educational projects.

"DatoCMS does not force you to speak its language, but gives you the peace of mind of being able to use the right solution for each project," says Matteo. "For Arduino, we chose React, because the language is very modular, fast to implement, and very smart: it loads only the interface blocks you weren't already using in the previous page."

To allow Arduino to create new sites as quickly as possible, Cantiere Creativo has made extensive use of DatoCMS Modular Blocks. "We were able to create modular content in record time so that the Arduino team can use them as building blocks for every kind of page structure," adds Matteo.

Faster, more optimized user experiences

The React and DatoCMS combo allowed Cantiere Creativo to work on optimizing the front end code.

"The results were amazing: we were able to move from 26,107 lines of code of the old version to just 1,267" remembers Matteo.

The internal pages average loading times have also seen a drastic change of pace: from 8.3 seconds to timings always under a second.

The new modular approach to coding and content management is going to help Arduino launch educational products faster, feeding content from a central hub, and with better performances.

"We're still working with Arduino on a couple of customized plugins to automate translations and markdown validations, but even now I would say they can launch a new product at least in half the times it took just a year ago," says Matteo