Transgourmet Distribution - Multi-Website-CMS

Enterprise Int.

Zusammenfassung

Transgourmet is a wholesaler for food and non-food for gastronomy, hotels and other foodservice companies with more than 3 Mrd. Euro yearly income. In 2018 1xINTERNET was asked to rebuild all websites of Transgourmet and Selgros, a subsidiary company.
Both companies operate many websites, reflecting business units and websites for brands.
The assignment was to create a unified yet flexible website product to relaunch all websites on the same technology and to enable a robust, secure, and efficient, development, maintenance and operation procedure.

Projektbeschreibung

The portal websites and microsites of the TransGourmet group were built at different times, by different teams, with different technologies, and with different designs.

In order to provide a consistent brand experience all websites should be rebuilt with the same technology and should be based on the same code base.

Drupal was chosen for this, and a design system, a Drupal distribution, and a series of websites should be created.

FEATURES

Modular function architecture
The distribution contains more than 50 custom modules, that can be individually turned on and off in projects.
Example of such modules are:
* Transgourmet search
Not all projects need search. If search is needed, all enabled content types are supported.
* Transgourmet languages
Different projects require different languages.
* Transgourmet personalisation
Some websites that have B2B and B2C shopping functionality require personalisation functionality to display content targeted at different user segments.
* Transgourmet catalogues
Some websites that offer or promote products also provide product catalogues.
* Transgourmet events
Some websites are used to communicate events.
* Transgourmet markets
Some websites display markets (e.g. Selgros.de with 500+ markets in Germany)
* Transgourmet recipes
Some B2B websites provide recipes for their users

Customer facing features
A lot of features for the users of the websites were implemented. From the perspective of a professional Drupal agency none of these features are particularly special, but for the customer they create a lot of value.
In the following the most valuable features from the customers perspective are described.

Events with sign-up forms
Transgourmet offers a lot of events, workshops and fares in their different markets. Therefore events functionality was created with topics, dates, places, and sign-up. With this functionality a large number of events are organised, and sign-ups are automatically processed on Transgourmet side. An example is here.

Catalogue management
A large number of catalogues are managed in the portal websites. Some cataloges are created directly in the CMS, others are produced with an external software and integrated with an API. Alongside with a large number of other media assets these are managed inside Drupal. An example is here.

Recipes
A lot of customers buy their products based on recipe ideas. Therefore it is common in the B2B food industry to offer recipes, and link the products for purchase. As a marketing measure transgourmet created a lot of recipe content that can be bought in their shop. In the case of Transgourmet the shop is an external application, and products and complete shopping baskets are created by deep-linking into the shop. In a later stage the shop will be integrated into Drupal.

Projektziele und -ergebnisse

The most important goal was to create a distribution that suits a modern B2B environment. Especially the interaction with the customer stood in the focus to provide the following requirements:
* new design and user-experience
* a customizable frontend for the different websites
* market selection and personalized market content
* sector specific events with the possibility to sign-up
* personalized banners with a flexible banner-admin tool for more than 200+ banners
* recipes and the possibility to order them in the shop

1xINTERNET created a Drupal 8 distribution (website product) on which all websites are running. The frontend was built as a design system with Patternlab, that is used by the Drupal distribution, as well as for a B2B headless commerce solution. All websites are set up in a way, so they can be developed, maintained, and deployed separately.

Transgourmet re-launched its portal website in summer 2019 and two microsites within the following months. In 2020 the portal website of Selgros will be re-launched, after that the rest of the microsites will follow.

Herausforderungen

The most important challenge was to work closely together with all stakeholders on the side of Transgourmet to provide a website product that fits for all requirements.
Besides consolidating all web related technologies, all operations were moved to the cloud.

Since all websites have different product owners with varying requirements the product organisation and continuous integration and delivery also had to be unified.
On the technical side a challenge was to support older browsers, because many users in the B2B food landscape use older hard and software.

Community-Beiträge

A number of contributions were created in this project, the following new modules were contributed:
* Google ReCAPTCHA v3 (https://www.drupal.org/project/recaptcha_v3)
Google reCAPTCHA v3 returns a score for each request without explicit user interaction. Based on this score form submissions can be allowed or further CAPTCHA tests can be applied.
* Config Patch Gitlab (https://www.drupal.org/project/config_patch_gitlab_api)
When configuration is changed in the UI of Drupal, the difference in configuration can be sent as a merge request to any Gitlab backend using the Gitlab API.
* Toastr messages (https://www.drupal.org/project/toastr)
The Toastr module implements the Toastr.js library. Toastr is a Javascript library for Gnome / Growl type non-blocking notifications.

Warum sollte dieses Projekt die Splash Awards gewinnen?

Creating an updatable product with Drupal (a Drupal distribution) that is used in a large number of websites is far more challenging than launching a single website. For Transgourmet.de, Selgros.de (launch in 2020), and all the brand website (multiple launches in 2020), this was successfully done.
While building all the functionality we had the chance to contribute a number of features back to Drupal.
We are very proud of having created a complex yet successful product using Drupal’s full functionality.