Michelin powered by Apostrophe

France-based Michelin, the largest tire manufacturer in the world, started their search in 2013 for a better content management system to help them reduce the time from website idea to launch.

With an 8-figure investment into a CMS strategy that ultimately could not handle the demands of Michelin, their project was aborted in search of a better, more robust open source CMS.

With less capital available and a desire for as little financial risk as possible, Michelin needed to find a robust CMS that could handle their needs to manage upwards of 200 websites in dozens of languages.

Michelin’s developers found and started building a few sites with the ApostropheCMS open-source GitHub repo.
 

Michelin desired a high capacity CMS to manage upward of 200 websites with as little financial risk as possible.
 

The openness of the ApostropheCMS technology made it easy for developers to spin up a small side-project or corporate site from the same codebase, allowing for ease in development. 

Built on Node.js

End-to-end open source JavaScript experience.

Tooling Michelin loves

MongoDB, npm, Express, among others.

Powerful localization tools

Michelin is using the ApostropheCMS Workflow module to localize dozens of languages across over 50 country websites from each single instance, and multiple instances to power different web projects.

Adopting a CMS that is based on Node.js, an open-source JavaScript development platform heralded as the new standard of web development, meant Michelin could attract and keep high quality developers who want to use modern tools and technology stacks.

ApostropheCMS’s front-end and back-end are both in Javascript, which allowed developers on both sides of a project to work in tandem, speaking the same language and sharing robust libraries. 

Two months after developing on ApostropheCMS’s free, open source codebase, Michelin contacted the ApostropheCMS team to have a second set of eyes review their websites before they went live. A relationship blossomed and Michelin contracted the ApostropheCMS team for Enterprise-level support.

Since Quarter 4 2017, Michelin has deployed over 350 websites with Apostrophe with plans to deploy a large-scale B2B program in Europe and to migrate B2C sites in North America during 2021. The sites span across 57 countries, 32 languages, 8 brands, and 9 business lines.

Etienne and his colleagues have continued confidence in building on ApostropheCMS for a few reasons:

• ApostropheCMS is not a young product; it’s been around since 2008. Michelin has watched ApostropheCMS’s team rewrite code to work faster, constantly improving the core functionality.
   
• The relationship Michelin has with the ApostropheCMS team is built on trust and hard work. The founders of ApostropheCMS traveled to Lyon, France to visit with Michelin and provide weekly support via a standing video conference call for over 4 years.
   
• ApostropheCMS is designed to evolve. With more than 175 releases since launch, the content management system is constantly improving speed, features and functionality.

Michelin continues to contract with ApostropheCMS for Enterprise-level support and custom development.

Read Etienne's full review on G2.