Ronal Group

In order to provide Ronal Group with the platform they needed, we implemented an end-to-end solution, taking care of everything, from frontend to backend development, while also handling all the content management work that had to be done.

The concept design was made by Geyst, one of our design partners in Switzerland. A streamlined and user-centric design was the first step in providing Ronal with a responsive, pixel perfect implementation optimised for all screen sizes and popular resolutions, including mobile and tablet devices.

Using Drupal 8’s native multilingual capabilities we build an international website that makes the content available in 8 different languages.

Ronal also needed different content to be available depending on the country their clients are in. Therefore we used a multisite solution where we had several country websites that share the same codebase but have different databases. Ronal Wheels is available for Germany, France, Switzerland, Poland, Spain and the Czech Republic, and it also has an international website with content in English. Each of these country websites displays different content in their own language except for Switzerland which has the same content available in German, French, and Italian.

To help synchronize content and help editors have a much simpler workflow we implemented a content repository for all the common content (news, stories, and media assets) from the country websites. When editors add content they assign a country and a language to it. Then the content gets published either manually or automatically thanks to a cron job that we implemented to help with the process.

It was also important for users to have access directly to the country website they are interested in. To achieve this we used geolocation to detect the user’s country via their IP address and redirect them to the correct website. If users are from a different country than the ones listed above, they will be redirected to the international website.

Another interesting challenge was the fact that Ronal needed to manage all the products listed on their website in a much more efficient way. While Drupal can do this, we felt that it was a more complex solution for a much simpler need. Since we didn’t feel the need to over-engineer we chose Akeneo, an easy-to-use open-source product information management solution.

Akeneo is a tool which is optimised to manage product data. Thanks to the bulk editing functions that the tool provides, several products can be edited at the same time. Using Akeneo, content editors import product data from .xlsx / .csv files or other data sources without the need for extra programming. We then take the data from Akeneo and display it in the frontend in Drupal while also implementing different product filtering options and grouping different product families according to the design.

We also needed to integrate two external web applications, namely the Configurator and Technical Guide. To perform this, we used iframes and implemented different integration options for each country website which editors can configure themselves.

Another integration that we performed was with MailChimp, our email marketing tool of choice, to help Ronal with creating and sending out newsletters.

There is also a Dealer area which lists all the dealers and locations where you can buy Ronal products. This list constantly changes as new dealers join the network. To make sure that what is listed on the website is always up to date, we implemented a cron job that checks Ronal’s database daily and updates the website automatically if needed.