Sector(s)
Team Members
The Solvay Group, headquartered in Brussels, is a large chemical company with more than 135 workplaces in 61 countries and employs more than 25,000 people. The company has its origin in 1863, founded by Ernest Solvay, thanks to the discovery of a process to produce soda ash in a much more efficient way than the processes of that time. Thanks to this new process Ernest Solvay was able to raise a large business group, without forgetting a philanthropic component from which emerged the well-known Solvay Conferences, congresses held from 1911 to the present. In the congresses of the beginning of the 20th century, the greatest scientists of the time such as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Schrödinger, Niels Bohr or Werner Heisenberg met, and in them the future of Physics and Chemistry of the time was defined, treating with heated discussions topics such as novel and still not very intuitive quantum mechanics.
Solvay, as a large company, has special needs for its brand websites. It needs a powerful main website to showcase its product offer and general information, so as to expand brand awareness and enable lead generation. And it also requires websites for each of the countries in which it has a strong presence, not forgetting websites for each of the most important products and brands it offers to its customers.
Their former solution, a closed source CMS, was not enough for their needs. As a result of this, Solvay decided to switch their corporate websites to Drupal, leveraging all the power of this open CMS.
Solvay decided to partner with other companies that could give the best service for their big project. Mirum, as a digital agency, would be in charge of coordinating the project and providing creativity and design. Metadrop would cover all the technical part of development and project management. And finally, Acquia, the Drupal creator's company, would provide its hosting infrastructure and ensure the proper technical development of the project.
The first step was to develop the main site, after which many more would come. This project leverages the Acquia Cloud Site Factory, allowing just on code base for all sites, managed from a centralized tool in Acquia Cloud.
About the project
The main goal was to develop the Solvay main site under Drupal, creating up the foundations for the following websites (country sites, brands sites, product sites, etc). Due to business needs, there was a critical deadline for the new website to come to life, and it wasn't a long one. In just a few months the design, the implementation and the deployment had to be finished.
The size of the involved team, with was composed by staff from four companies (Solvay, Mirum, Acquia and Metadop), along with still-on-definition project requirements was perfect for the Agile approach Metadop uses on the developing of its projects.
Acquia Cloud Site Factory
Site Factory is a tool presented by Acquia just a year ago this project was started. It provides a Drupal multisite setup where you can spin up a new site just selecting one the Drupal profiles available in the project's code base.
That means this Acquia web hosting solution for Drupal allows you to create hundreds of sites and manage them from the ACSF console sharing the same code base. The idea is that each site is installed using any of the Drupal profiles available in the project sources. This shared code base can be updated and managed as a single package instead of having to manage each site separately. ACSF is itself a hosting solution with different environments (development, testing, UAT and production) managed by Acquia with facilities to deploy new releases, perform certain operations and system functionalities (such as logging into the different sites by an Acquia user, backups on demand, proxy cache, load balancers, multiple webheads, etc).
Although ACSF uses common Drupal concepts, using this new tool was a challenge. Metadrop had to learn the way to deliver code to this tool and organize features in profiles to match the site types Solvay had planned.
Features
The showcased website, Solvay.com, is just the first site of many with these following main features:
- Migration from a closed source CMS: Leveraging migrate module to load data from the previous CMS.
- API REST: some entities had to be managed by other Solvay system, so a API REST was provided for this task.
- External API implementation: at the same time, some data was pulled from Solvay's APIs, with a custom implementation for those APIs.
- Advanced search: Solr is used to power the search of the site.
- Multilanguage: with many sites on sight from different countries and different languages, all the functionalities had to be multilanguage.
- External DAM: Keepeek was integrated as part of the website requirements.
- Salesforce integration: All webforms are integrated with Salesforce for easy management by Solvay staff.
- Complex content creation with Paragraphs: paragraph types were developed to allow Solvay staff to add content with the maximum freedom but coherent results.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was first chosen by Solvay as the tool to implement its websites, migrating from Tridion SDL, a closed-source CMS, to an open source CMS with a big community behind that works hard improving Drupal day by day. The flexibility and extendability of Drupal 8, the availability of solid Drupal development companies, the Drupal security team and the multisite setup were among the reasons to choose Drupal.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Just to mention a few, those are some modules related to the main functionalities of this site.
- JSON API: the base to create an API to manage certain Drupal content from Solvay's system.
- Paragraph: Contents can have flexible but prebuilt blocks thanks to Paragrahps.
- Webform: Easily create forms to put in contact visitors to different Solvay departments.
- Search API Solr: Base connection from Drupal to Solr to create a powerful search system.
- Migrate: Base mechanism to migrate content from previous CMS to Drupal.
- Acquia Cloud Site Factory Connector: This module represents the link between the site and the hosting platform, Acquia Cloud Site Factory.
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