Vicat needed a robust digital platform capable of managing a diverse range of content and business requirements, while meeting the regulatory and operational demands of a listed international industrial group.
About the project
Goals
- Provide the Vicat group with a single bilingual corporate showcase covering its identity, solutions, commitments, careers and financial information
- Give the investor relations team full autonomy over the publication of regulated information
- Consolidate a large editorial legacy (500+ news items, references, testimonials) into a consistent and searchable platform
- Modernise and secure the technical foundation, and guarantee its operational continuity over the long term
Requirements
- Full French/English site, with independent editorial workflows per language
- A dedicated financial area: key figures, financial results, press releases and presentations, general meetings, shareholder information, regulated information, financial calendar and live share price
- A component-based page builder allowing editors to compose pages without development
- A careers section connected to the group's recruitment platform
- A secure whistleblowing channel compliant with the French and European whistleblower protection rules
- Fast, typo-tolerant search across content and downloadable documents
- GDPR-compliant consent management and strong anti-spam protection on all forms
Outcome
- A Drupal 11 corporate platform in French and English, with more than 20 content types and around 45 Paragraph components
- A financial section with automated classification of financial documents, a dedicated events calendar and a share price block fed in real time by the market data provider
- A whistleblowing form whose notifications are digitally signed with S/MIME and whose submissions are stored in a private file system
- Elasticsearch-based search with autocompletion, plus faceted filtering of news and media documents backed by Redis caching
- Job offers published automatically from the group's applicant tracking system
- A containerised deployment on Kubernetes (Helm charts, horizontal autoscaling, Redis) driven by GitLab CI pipelines
- A stable, continuously updated platform, kept aligned with Drupal core security releases
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was selected to run the corporate and financial platform of a listed industrial group operating in 12 countries:
- Structured content modelling able to describe a very heterogeneous corpus (corporate, CSR, careers, regulated financial information)
- Native multilingual support with full translation of content, menus, taxonomies and metadata
- Granular roles, permissions and publication workflows shared between the communication, investor relations and HR teams
- Enterprise-grade security policy and long-term support, a requirement for a platform publishing regulated financial information
- An open API layer allowing integration with the group's business systems (recruitment platform, market data provider, search engine)
- Proven caching and scalability strategies for traffic peaks around financial announcements
Drupal offers a single, sustainable foundation covering corporate storytelling, regulatory obligations and employer branding.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Paragraphs and Scheduler structure the editorial work. Around forty Paragraph types cover every pattern of the site - key figures, timelines, financial document lists, testimonials, maps, video blocks - so new pages are assembled from validated components rather than developed. Scheduler adds the embargo capability the investor relations team needs: financial press releases and regulated information are prepared in advance and published automatically at the exact time they become public.
Webform, Symfony Mailer Lite and SAML Authentication cover forms, notifications and security. Webform carries every contact and whistleblowing form, with submissions stored in a private file system. Symfony Mailer Lite provided the extension point on which a custom mail plugin was built to sign whistleblowing notifications with S/MIME, meeting the confidentiality requirements attached to that channel. SAML Authentication connects the back office to the group identity provider, so no local password is managed for the editorial teams.
Search Autocomplete, Schema.org Metatag, Geolocation, Redis and Gin complete the platform. Search Autocomplete puts the Elasticsearch index within immediate reach from the header, on a site holding more than five hundred news items and a large document library. Schema.org Metatag exposes the corporate, article and FAQ structured data both language versions rely on. Geolocation maps the group's sites and offices, Redis absorbs the traffic peaks that follow financial announcements, and Gin gives the communication, finance and HR teams a modern and readable administration interface.
