Calier is one of the companies of Grupo Indukern, together with the well-known kernpharma.com. Calier is a veterinary laboratory present in more than 80 countries through its 12 subsidiaries.
They have production plants in Spain, Colombia, Morocco and Uruguay at the forefront in the manufacture of pharmacological and biological products.
About the project
When they asked Omitsis to make the website they had very clear objectives in mind:
Infrastructure by subsidiary
To have a website for calier international (calier.com) and to be able to easily replicate it for their subsidiaries, which they would upload by default as a folder from calier international. For example: calier.com/italia.
Also, that at any time you could move a subsidiary to an independent domain. For example: calier.it
Migrate from Liferay to Drupal
Their website was in Liferay and was giving them many problems. Errors 500 randomly or sometimes only partially and did not load images or css well.
In addition the license costs were very high, especially compared to Drupal, which are 0.
Secondary objectives
In addition, they also wanted to be able to have a blog, improve SEO, improve and harmonize the graphic line of calier international and subsidiaries.
To achieve these objectives we did these steps mainly
Creation of pages using components
To get a great flexibility we created most of the pages using components (paragraphs) and the layout paragraphs module. Following the design we defined a paragraph for each component, each with different variations, each with a different view mode.
This allows great flexibility and power, to create the initial layout and to add new sections without having to program or design anything new, just using the defined components. You can always create new components, but usually it is not necessary and it makes the evolution of the website very low cost.
This is ideal for large and medium sized companies, because their website tends to evolve and grow a lot over time. And having a low cost of growth makes the total cost of the web decreases considerably.
Migration from Liferay to Drupal
As we mentioned before, the previous website was in Liferay. This had several problems:
- Licensing costs, which with Drupal go down to 0 (GPL license).
- Previous liferay website with many problems
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To make the migration, their previous provider gave us a csv
Uikit
As a framework we chose Uikit (Ukit theme in Drupal) because it allows great flexibility and great features as standard.
Modular page
To create the modular pages we use paragraphs and layout paragraphs. This allows us to create different types of components that are then available to the webmaster. In the order you want, each one with its own fields: title, subtitle, link, etc.
And using layout paragraphs we can insert components inside components. For example a two column layout with a call to action in the first column and an image in the second column.
Each component (paragraphs) has some default css attributes: margins, paddings, background colour, background image, width, etc. And the webmaster when creating the paragraphs can overwrite these default values with paragraph fields by assigning classes to them, which are then the ones that actually change the css attributes.
We do this using the classy paragraphs module that allows us to create a field that will allow us to activate classes that are then applied directly to the paragraph.
Blog
From Calier they were very clear that they wanted a section to get traffic, using all the expertise of their team, so we also created a blog, with a list of articles and a detail of each article.
Press room
Likewise, for articles more focused on calier, we created a press room section, with similar functionalities to the blog.
Vademecum of products
A very important section for the website was to show the vademecum of calier products. For this task we created a product content type and views with filters.
It should be noted that the products could have leaflets in pdf format, and that on the fly we added a watermark. To achieve this we used the FPDI library and FPDI PDF-Parser.
Pages for professionals only - modal
For legal issues for pharmacy products we have to ask the user if he/she is a professional user and if he/she is not, we don't let him/her see the content.
For this we show a modal that asks you if you are a professional: pressing yes hides the modal, pressing no goes to the previous page on the site if there was or to the home page.
Vademecum with alias species/line. Action to create these aliases
To make the vademecum views url friendly and to combine several taxonomy terms, we created an action to create an alias for each pair of species term and therapeutic line term.
Calier app for veterinarians
This could be a completely independent case study, due to the wide range of features and functionalities that this section has. But we will summarize it commenting that it is an intranet for veterinarians, a tool to track the vaccination of veterinarians calier customers.
The tool is a test, with questions of yes / no and image, mainly and with a style adapted to the mobile, which looks like an app.
Once the vets have answered a report is generated that their supervisor just fills in with comments and sends it back to the vet, so he/she can improve how he/she uses the vaccines.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal is a robust and proven open source CMS, which allowed us to respond to the client's needs in a very interesting time to market.
And our client was already simplifying its stack with Drupal and Wordpress as the main CMS's.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
