Team Members
5th Avenue Products Trading GmbH is the official exclusive importer of Habanos cigars for Germany, Austria and Poland. The company is a joint venture, specifically for the exclusive import and distribution of these legally protected cigars from Cuba. 5th Avenue distributes more than 27 Habanos brands in around 200 different formats, which are predominantly offered in upscale tobacco retailers.
About the project
Drupal Upgrade / Migration
We had built the 5th Avenue Products Trading GmbH website on Drupal 7 in 2015 and have been running and maintaining it on our servers ever since. As it is a visually very elaborate site, a large part of our upgrade work was for the theme: with Drupal 8, Twig allowed us to rewrite the theme – it is now much more elegant regarding its code and it performs better.
Basis for the theme: Bootstrap (Barrio) and SASS
The mature and often proven Bootstrap framework in version 4 forms the basis of the newly created theme via the flex-based base theme Bootstrap Barrio. We used the CSS language extension SASS with Node.js and Gulp to rebuild the theme efficiently and according to Atomic Design principles.
Important helpers: Drush & Migrate tools
The interaction of Drush & Migrate Tools is the foundation of any upgrade project. Once the question is decided what all should and can be migrated from the previous installation, then you can set about using these tools to transfer this content and also configurations.
Improvement during the upgrade: Media
After the basic migration of images from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, they are stored as file-fields. However, since Media has become available in the core during the Drupal 8 upgrade, we want to achieve consistent access to all media. Therefore, we have converted the previous file fields into real media objects with the module migrate files to media - as it should be in a contemporary Drupal installation.
Improvement during the upgrade: Commerce Entities
We had created 5th Avenue's products as Drupal Commerce Entities in the original site to have all options open for processing the products later. Since there was no viable upgrade path for them and we could take some complexity out of managing them, we migrated the Commerce Entities to ordinary nodes.
Views: new interactive product catalog
An important feature of the website is the cigar finder. It consists of a complex view for displaying and filtering the product range and is supported by additional JavaScript functionalities. The view had to be completely rebuilt manually for Drupal 8, but now also benefits from the use of the Twig template language.
Why Drupal was chosen
The site uses quite complex patterns in content and therefore the client needed a system capable of managing media and arranging predefined content templates (here: paragraphs) in an easy drag & drop interface.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Bootstrap / Barrio is a robust framework to build responsive websites and together with paragraphs it perfectly allowed us to break down the content and its design in well manageable chunks or patterns of content.
