About the client
Scrapi is operating in the UK and its main goal is pretty humanistic: it collects and recycles used and old cars, and pays car owners for that. A user needs to send a request on a website and then Scrapi’s employees stop by, take the car and give the calculated compensation.
You'll definitely like the technical stack of this headless Drupal project. See what ADCI Solutions did below.
About the project
Having the goals above in mind, we build a project using the following technical stack:
- Amazon Web Hosting
- GitLab CI
- REST API back end
- Integration with third-party services for the following: receiving the information about the car with the help of its registration number, address search, mailing
- Email newsletter via Sendinblue
- CRM
- Isomorphic front-end application built with Next.js
Back end
Scrapi is made on Drupal 8. Its caching system is based on Varnish and Memcached and the Contenta CMS distribution used for building REST API.
When it comes to the goals, we developed the feature of building custom pages out of ready-made blocks - paragraphs.
What else?
- Meta tags make the website more user-friendly
- Prices for the metal in different regions being imported from external resources
- Vehicles are recognized by their registration numbers
- Sendinblue API integration for CRM contacts management and automatic email campaigns launch.
- Tested business logic: even if the car with a particular vehicle registration number was already scrapped (someone could have entered the wrong number), the website checks the car’s VIN to recognize what vehicle we have here.
Front end
Scrapi is an isomorphic web application that uses the Next.js server-side rendering.
It shows a page rendered on the server side in advance to a user, and only then includes the page being shown into the life cycle of React on the client side. This approach helps to provide the user with a quick-loaded and more user-friendly interface, the quick switching between pages without reloading the page.
All the above benefits not only end-users but the company’s marketing as well. Scrapi is a Single Page Application which the search engines cannot index SPA properly; in our case, search engines get a rendered page much earlier than all JS scripts are fully executed.
Order an SEO-friendly Drupal website: we at ADCI Solutions always go the extra mile and offer the business solution that fits your needs and plans.
Why Drupal was chosen
Our client challenged us with the following goals:
- Give website managers the tool to build pages on their own
- Make the website SEO-friendly
- Use a modern front-end framework to provide a seamless experience for clients
Our Headless Drupal project made the dreams requirements come true.
If you need to pitch Drupal to your clients, just tell them about distinct Drupal features!
- A ready-made architecture for custom functionality lets developers focus on business logic and not reinvent the wheel building typical features from scratch.
- Drupal 8 is based on Symfony components, so the steep learning curve is not that steep anymore: anyone dealing with PHP can learn and work with Drupal.
- The admin dashboard goes out-of-the-box; it allows to customize the data structure without dealing with low-level SQL queries or working with ORM; also, the configuration of the CMS can be changed in the admin panel.
- The built-in system for import/export of active configurations from the database to .yml files and vice versa.
- Changes made in the admin panel (settings of the CMS, modules, data) can be transferred between environments (development, test, production).
- Headless Drupal and the API-first approach support.
Do you need to speed up development time and lower the cost? Choose Drupal.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
