Transgourmet - Content hub & app
Nominee
Case summary
The Transgourmet Content Hub is a comprehensive platform, leveraging a combination of contributed and custom modules to efficiently deliver content across various website frontends, social media channels, and a web app.
Case description
_Content hub_The integrated content hub serves as a centralized platform where teams can efficiently generate and manage content across various channels and consolidates all content creation activities for marketing. With a central database at its core, the platform currently supports four public-facing channels (https://www.transgourmet.ch, https://www.frischeparadies.ch, www.cook.transgourmet.ch and app[1]). Additionally, the platform seamlessly integrates with Hootsuite, allowing streamlined publishing across multiple social media channels.
_Personalized experience_
Users have the convenience of logging into the platform channel using their existing client login via Single Sign-On (SSO). This seamless login integration implemented with drupal/open_connect and custom code enables the content hub to personalize the displayed content based on users' preferences such as market and delivery center, as well as their previous purchases.
_Product search and shopping assistant app_
Leveraging the capabilities of Apache's SOLR platform and drupal/search_api, users can perform comprehensive searches using full text and apply various filters to refine their results. Each product page provides comprehensive details specifically designed for restaurant owners, including information about ingredients, allergens, and proper storage instructions. Users can also use an inbuild barcode scanner to find products directly within the app.
Additionally, the app enables users to create personalized shopping lists, facilitating easy collaboration by allowing them to share the lists with their coworkers. To streamline the shopping experience, products are automatically sorted as they are encountered in the preferred brick and mortar store of the user.
_Streamlined content management_
The platform currently handles over half a million content entities, serving around 7,000 users, and encompassing over 40,000 media items. To effectively manage this extensive volume of content, we have implemented an assignment workflow specifically designed for the marketing team.
With the assignment workflow, each content element can be seamlessly attached to the desired page using parameters such as location, channels, and publishing/unpublishing dates. This flexible approach enables the team to reuse the same content in different contexts, maximizing efficiency and ensuring consistent messaging across multiple channels.
Case goals and results
_Consolidated content hub_The primary objective was to create a content hub that served as a centralized system for managing all content and interactions with clients on different websites. This entailed consolidating content creation, organization, and distribution processes into a single platform, streamlining workflows and enhancing efficiency. The new hub replaces a previously diverse network of systems, tools, and websites.
_Personalization / User experience_
A key focus of the project was to deliver personalized experiences to a diverse and extensive customer base, regardless of whether they had a login or not. By leveraging user preferences and, with login through SSO, their existing profiles, the platform was to deliver customized content tailored to individual users' needs.
_Integrated marketing activities_
The platform should also simplify marketing campaigns by implementing a comprehensive set of tools and features. This includes a user-friendly visual editor for creation and customization of landing pages, flexible forms to gather customer data efficiently, automated QR code generation for seamless tracking and engagement, integration with external analytics platforms to gain valuable insights, and marketing automation capabilities to streamline campaign management and improve overall efficiency.
Challenges
_Complex interactions and personalization_The project involved managing complex interactions between content items, targeting, channels (websites, social media, app), and user preferences. This required both a robust framework as well as custom extensions on Drupal core and drupal/domain an to facilitate managing the content and enabling the marketing team.
_Integration with multiple systems_
The project required integration with several unique systems, including an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, Google My Business (GMB), Hootsuite, a newsletter tool, Keycloak for SSO and the Tealium analytics platforms. We used several contributed modules like drupal/openid_connect, drupal/tealium, drupal/google_mybusiness_api and improved each module with custom code.
_High load and personalized content variations_
The platform handles several thousand user accounts and personalized content with up to 100 million requests per month, and it experienced usage spikes during newsletter and magazine publishing dates of up to 1 million requests per hour. This required both an optimized code base, custom cache layers within the application and an individual hosting solution with CDN.
Community contributions
- Several bug fixes for both core and contrib modules, with a specific focus on D9 upgrades or improvements for domain, webform, ui_patterns/ui_suite and other modules.- Strong advancement of the pagedesigner module (https://www.drupal.org/project/pagedesigner)
- The creation of the Auto Short QR code module (https://www.drupal.org/project/autoshortqr)
- Multiple other open-sourced modules on Github.
Hosting
iqual custom hosting on Exoscale combined with Cloudflare CDN