Wertgarantie
The Hanover-based insurance group WERTGARANTIE SE uses Drupal 9 in the form of a group-owned distribution. Three country setups are now operated on the basis of this distribution: Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands. erdfisch's tasks lie in the areas of technical design, solution architectures, and implementation. Furthermore, erdfisch supports the in-house IT department in setting up and configuring a Kubernetes-based hosting environment for the country setups. A special feature of the project is that it is being implemented by a mixed team of employees from erdfisch and Wertgarantie. Developers from both the customer and the service provider work together in a team, with erdfisch also responsible for knowledge transfer and quality assurance.
In 2020, the conversion of wertgarantie.de to Drupal was completed – at that time not yet in the form of a distribution. Planning for a group-owned distribution began the following year, when it became clear that the Austrian country site would also be converted to Drupal and that other countries might follow suit. In October 2021, wertgarantie.at was launched on the basis of the new distribution. The German country site followed at the end of 2021. In mid-2022, the Dutch country site was relaunched with the help of the distribution as the third instance.
From the customer's point of view, a major advantage of Drupal during the switch to the distribution was that the existing “wertgarantie.de” setup could be further developed in parallel during the development period of the distribution, and no “feature freeze” was necessary for this. Subsequently, the “.de” setup was also converted to the distribution, but was able to retain its additional functions, which it had over and above the initial functional scope of the distribution. Some of these additional functions have now also been transferred to the distribution and are thus available to all country websites.
Project Goals and Results
Wertgarantie SE required that the country websites be technically consolidated on the basis of Drupal. This ensures that new country sites can be rolled out and put into operation with less effort. Although operating multiple instances based on a Drupal distribution results in additional deployment and DevOps costs, this is more than offset by lower maintenance costs and the ability to further develop the systems centrally. Once developed, distribution function packages can then be made available to all running instances.
Another goal of the customer was to build up and expand Drupal expertise within the company itself. To this end, the service provider's solution architects and developers work together with the customer's in-house developers and project managers in a joint project team. This way of working not only minimizes friction losses in coordination and communication. It also creates the opportunity to continuously improve the skills of the in-house developers and to make acceptance and quality assurance processes very efficient. Due to the close coordination within the joint team, conflicts due to differing expectations or communication friction losses are practically non-existent.
Challenges
**1. Technical design of the distribution**
One major challenge was that, despite all their similarities, the instances had to remain customizable in certain areas. In order to retain the advantages of a distribution—mainly centralized further development and central maintenance—our development team chose a solution based on “Configuration Synchronizer.” This made it possible to continue developing the existing setup at wertgarantie.de in parallel with the distribution and then switch to it afterwards.
**2. Content management on steroids**
Another challenge was to give the customer the ability to quickly and easily create and edit numerous SEO-friendly content pages or landing pages with limited in-house editorial staff. To this end, erdfisch developed the concept of “virtual entities.”
These function like real Drupal entities, but are dynamically generated from existing content modules in the system. Content types and taxonomies can be freely combined. From a few hundred pieces of content or taxonomy terms, it is therefore possible to generate many thousands of virtual pages, all of which are different.
For example, there is a taxonomy of places that contains city names, and there is content on various insurable device classes—such as smartphones and, more specifically, smartphone repairs. Virtual entities can now be used to automatically combine information from both areas, enabling the dynamic creation of a special landing page (e.g., smartphone repair services in Hamburg) with a corresponding URL.
Furthermore, there is now also a views integration for virtual entities, so that they can now even be used in other areas of the project that are generated with views, such as blocks. With virtual entities, Wertgarantie's internal content creation department can thus create and administer a far greater number of absolute pages than if they all had to be created in the conventional way.
**3. Context is king**
A third challenge was to give editors the ability to manipulate the context in which the content they create is displayed, i.e., those elements that are rendered together with the actual editorial content, such as menus, teaser blocks, or web forms.
Drupal does have a system for performing context-dependent operations on a page called Contextual Filter. However, it is not very easy to use and is intended more for site building than for editorial use. For the Wertgarantie setup, erdfisch has therefore greatly simplified the use of contexts in a Drupal setup. This solution is plugin-based. If new contexts are required, they can be written and integrated as a new plugin and are then available to editors.
Editors, in turn, can use contexts in the editorial backend provided for them. For example, they can use the context to specify which other content (e.g., teasers, related articles, calls to action) should be added to a particular piece of content. If the article being edited is about bicycles, for example, the finished rendered page should contain different additional components than if it were about smartphones. But elements of the header, footer, or navigation can also be influenced by the choice of context. All of this happens automatically as soon as the appropriate context has been selected.
**4. Better Views Block**
Views is known as the Swiss Army knife of Drupal for creating different views of a set of fields that ultimately make up all of Drupal's content. This means that an article can be rendered in full view, or only individual elements from it can be used in a view, such as a teaser consisting of a headline, text, and photo, or perhaps just the title in the form of a list.
Since there are practically no limits to the variety of options here, the risk of making mistakes during configuration also increases, especially if the user's actual focus is on creating and managing content. That's why the Wertgarantie setup includes “Better Views Block,” a very useful addition that saves the editorial team from having to dive into the actual Views backend when they need new variants of a teaser, for example. With Better Views Block, new variants can be created quickly and easily from the frontend view of the views and are then immediately available for use.
Conclusion
Wertgarantie SE recognizes the advantages of open source and particularly appreciates the great flexibility of Drupal. The decision to use Drupal for the country setups demonstrates Wertgarantie's confidence in Drupal's future viability and is further proof that open source, and Drupal in particular, provides an economical and sustainable basis for enterprise solutions in the online sector.
