By Bret Peters on

The Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank) awarded Fig Leaf Software a blanket purchase agreement (BPA) for IT software development and sustained engineering of the Ex-Im Online Program. Ex-Im Bank’s mission is to assist in financing the export of U.S. goods and services to international markets. With more than 78 years of experience, Ex-Im Bank has supported more than $456 billion of U.S. exports, primarily to developing markets worldwide.

Over the past decade, Fig Leaf Software’s on-site team of web developers have engineered a variety of solutions for the bank that include, but are not limited to the following:

  • Migration of their internet web presence from a ColdFusion-based CMS to an open-source Drupal platform
  • Migration of their intranet from Microsoft Sharepoint to Acquia Drupal in the Amazon AWS Government Cloud
  • Implementation of Salesforce.com Government Service Cloud, Data.com and Scribe
  • Implementation of HubSpot Inbound Marketing for government
  • Custom web applications that leverage Javascript frameworks and Google Maps
Visit exim.gov →
Why Drupal was chosen: 

Fig Leaf Software developed migrated Ex-Im’s ColdFusion/CommonSpot CMS public-facing web site onto a Drupal 7 platform. Using the Drupal Panopoly distribution (https://www.drupal.org/project/panopoly) as a base enables Ex-Im contributors to place content on a page via a drag and drop interface. To meet or exceed their requirements, we also had to add the following customizations:

  • Extended the Drupal Google Search Appliance module to enable faceted search.
  • Develop a custom menu module system “MenuSplitter” to handle complex navigation, enabling contributors to adds blocks to the Exim main menu and control markup within that menu.
  • Implemented the home page using a “parallax” design
  • Develop a system whereby top-page banners are deployed based on organizational groupings of content.
  • Programmatically import content into Drupal from the legacy CMS

Fig Leaf’s Drupal themers used Sass and Grunt to create a subtheme from Drupal’s Omega 4 base theme (https://www.drupal.org/project/omega) in order to implement the agency’s custom responsive design in record time.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

Fig Leaf developed and deployed the site on-time and on in an extremely short timeframe of only 4 months. This enabled Ex-Im to more effectively communicate their mission and results to the general public and Congress in order to build support for continued funding of their agency. Fig Leaf continues to provide onsite supplemental Drupal staffing and general Web support to the Bank.

Technical specifications

Drupal version: 
Drupal 7.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used: 
Google Search Appliance
Menu Admin Splitter
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 
  • Extended the Drupal Google Search Appliance module to enable faceted search.
  • Develop a custom menu module system “MenuSplitter” to handle complex navigation, enabling contributors to adds blocks to the Exim main menu and control markup within that menu.
Sectors: 
Banking and Financial