Expanding global presence for the European Bartending School using Drupal 8
MULTI-SITE PLATFORM
DRUPAL 8 DEVELOPMENT
DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT
PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION
Client Overview
European Bartender School (EBS) is the world’s leading bartender school with 25+ bartender schools located in 5 continents (Europe, Asia, North America, Australia, and Africa). Established in 1999, EBS offers the most advanced bartender courses and specialized training programs.
Project Overview
The client wanted each franchise to have its own independent website, with brand guidelines from BarSchool global website. These franchise sites would be owned by ESB, with limited access granted to the franchise to update course information, important announcements, etc.
We leveraged Drupal’s multisite feature that enables multiple franchise sites to be created from a single codebase.
We also improved asset management by leveraging Drupal’s media module and established a standard process for configuration management.
Client Testimonial
Communication with QED42 is excellent. If potential issues arise, they raise them so we can arrive at the best solution together. They were highly flexible and adapted perfectly to how EBS would like to run/control certain aspects of the project.
Client Requirements
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Allow each franchise to have their own website, utilising the same components and structure of the parent site, but with specific local content.
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Each franchise site to be a clone of their main site, w.r.t the structure, theme and content, ensuring consistency in the franchise sites
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All features developed for the corporate website were to be rolled out easily for all the franchises with ease and less effort
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Allow each franchise to have multiple local school subsites
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Rolling out multiple franchise websites to be seamless and easy with minimal tech support
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Provide an easy and relevant URL for the franchisee to market.
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Support multilingual content
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Users to be redirected from the main site to the regional market website automatically
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Showcase local school details on the main website based on the user's geography
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Improve the site performance & media asset management
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Extend the components to support the geographical content
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Single cookie management for parent and franchise sites
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Improve the server stack and deployment process on AWS.
Our Approach
Dynamic multi-site architecture
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We leveraged Drupal’s multisite feature with some enhancements for handling numerous franchise sites with ease.
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We added a new database with a couple of configuration changes to the codebase and server.
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We then automated this entire process with the help of a bash script, which takes care of setting up Drupal along with the new site's information and makes the necessary changes to the hosted server.
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This enabled a new site to be rolled out in less than 4 hours.
Our Solution
Asset management using Drupal DAM - Media module
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The existing website was using a file system to manage the media assets on the website. It was a deprecated approach to manage the media asset.
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It had major drawbacks like no reusability, grouping the asset, etc.
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So, we migrated the files to a media entity, in this process we identified and removed the unused images and videos.
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Updated the existing file fields with media fields and standardised the media management via the media browser
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Increased reusability by integrating media browsers in the CKEditor.
Central cookie management system to improve user experience
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GDPR consent section is mandatory to ensure that each franchise website has a GDPR cookie consent section. Accepting the GDPR consent on all the franchise websites individually was not a good user experience.
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If a user has accepted the cookie policy on the global website then it was incorrect to show him/her the cookie policy section again.
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So we created a custom feature to manage single cookie accept features for all the websites.
Geography based content
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The client did not want to create new components for each franchise site and so we re-used the components such as paragraphs, blocks, and content types from the parent site.
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Since we were using a single code base, the same structure and theming were implemented for the components on the franchisee websites.
Reducing time to market with default content creation while creating a new website
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Each franchise website had a similar content structure except for the regional information.
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So, we created a placeholder site with some default & placeholder content required for launching the franchise site.
Reduced the time and cost during the deployment with an improved server stack on the AWS server
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We implemented a docker-based environment and suggested better server tech specs as per the new multi-site architecture.
Business Benefits
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Enabled multiple franchise website rollouts requiring minimal technical support
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Enabled geo-targeting the inquiries to local business schools
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Dynamic multi-site architecture with no development team dependency in rolling out any new franchise website
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Improved asset management experience with Drupal’s media module
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Optimized performance for the BarSchool multi-site platform
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Enhance development process and improved deployment process on AWS server
Drupal 8's multisite feature allowed independent sites to be served from a single codebase, leading to a minimal dependency on the development team for rolling out any new franchise websites for the European Bartending School.
Technology Stack
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