Note: This site was developed under NDA and due to the commercial nature of the project we cannot disclose any details relating to the client.
Overview
A large and rapidly growing company in the travel sector desperately needed to overhaul their existing web infrastructure. The last few years had seen this company go from a small niche player, to an established company with annual revenues of more than £50 million. Their current site was no longer fit for purpose, creaking under the strain of growth. Adding new products, maintaing existing ones, extracting sales data and integrating external APIs took inordinate amount of time and effort.
One of the key factors of this client's success was branding and white labeling. They have developed several strong brands and have several white labeled sites, creating multiple revenue streams from several different countries.
At a high level, the requirements for the new platform were:
- A multisite platform.
- Easy to create new sites for future brands.
- Content shared across the brands, but with brand specific fields.
- Separate user registration for each brand.
- Different currencies for each brand.
- Different language for each brand.
Development
To determine the best solution, we did a full review of the available options including drupal multisite, and xml-rpc between separate sites. We decided on using Domain Access module to provide the multisite functionality. Domain Access allows multiple sites to be driven from one database and codebase. Content can be shared between domains, the code is easily maintainable and only a single database is required.
Ubercart was used to provide the ecommerce functionality. Although Ubercart provides a full ecommerce solution, a significant amount of custom code was required to provide the exact functionality. This included:
- Different prices per domain.
- Multiple cost currencies.
- Multiple price currencies.
- Different credit card options and prices per domain.
A host of other features were also developed through a combination of existing modules and custom code. These include: and affiliate system, charting and reporting functionality and an enhanced backend for booking.
For theming we used the usual Zen theme. This came into its own in the multisite setup as it allowed us to develop one sub theme per domain and reuse a large amount of the code.
Outcome
After several months of development, the platform was delivered to the client's in house team for content loading, UAT and final tweaking. The client now has a powerful and scalable platform for growth. New brands, currencies and languages can easily be added allowing the client execute their strategy of launching in new territories, building new brands and providing white labeled solutions to third parties.
Image credit: Hryck
