Sector(s)
EASA is the centerpiece of the European Union's strategy for aviation safety. It is responsible for setting the rules, guidelines and standards for all safety and environmental aspects of civil aviation.
The EASA Drupal 7 website was developed by EWORX in 2014 and was a complete overhaul in terms of design, structure and technologies of the static HTML site that it replaced. It was revamped again by EWORX over the course of the next four years, and migration to Drupal 8 commenced in late 2018.
About the project
The main objective of this project was to enhance the way in which end users interact with the website, and to allow visitors to control and personalise updates relevant to their interests. Moreover, increasing content outreach and enhancing the communication and dissemination of the Agency’s work was vital.
Another objective was to make the website’s content easier to find, browse, digest, and utilise. The EASA website features more than 55K nodes, over 50 content types (across a wide range of topics, some of which are highly technical), and more than 50 taxonomies and hundreds of taxonomy terms. We wanted to make the site more welcoming for non-technical visitors, while at the same time keeping the Agency’s core content and structure intact. To achieve this objective, the site was split into two subsites, within the same Drupal installation, i.e. EASA Pro and EASA Light.
Due to the personalised content, the pages that render personalised results (which in theory could include thousands of nodes) had to be implemented in a way that was both scalable and effective. The solution was to create a tailored, effective, and scalable API for data queries, and a React frontend for content rendering. This API formed the basis of the backend infrastructure for all personalisation features.
In addition, the website had to make use of latest technologies to enhance the services offered to its’ end users, therefore we developed two Progressive Web Apps.
Finally, the above objectives had to be implemented with usability, accessibility, and performance in mind, as well as to be able to scale for many thousands of registered users.
Why Drupal was chosen
The previous website was on Drupal 7 and our client was already familiar and secure with the system’s capabilities. Drupal 8 allowed the content management effort required to be kept to a minimum by introducing several automations, while simultaneously providing our client with an array of new functionalities.
The EASA website needed a robust platform to facilitate complicated data structure and integrations with various third party applications (Fastly, Solr, Campaign Monitor, EASA’s Active Directory), therefore Drupal 8 was an ideal solution. A further reason why Drupal 8 was chosen is that it’s built on modern architecture with a focus on future releases, which allows for a sustainable site requiring only minor transitions in the future.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
