Inventing, designing and developing a new digital tourism platform in just 3 months? A challenge that web agency Calibrate did not shy away from.
Openmonumenten.be is the brand new platform on which all events and monuments of the non-profit organization Herita and their partners are visualized for the general public. However, do not confuse this website with the website: Open Monumentendag.be. Open Monumentendag is just one of the events that can be found on the brand new platform. Dive into our case and find out all about it.
About the project
Results achieved
When the website went live, it was immediately clear that the new platform would bring about the big change Herita wanted.
No less than 250k visitors visit the website of openmonumenten.be every year. Together they view nearly 1 million pages on the website and stayed on the website for an average of 2 minutes. In other words, we see a qualitative audience that finds the information they are looking for. We also see that this audience clearly interacts on the site: over 80k unique conversions per year.
Technical highlights of the new website
For the website visitors:
Overview of all events and monuments in map or list view.
Extensive search module for events, monuments and thematic discovery pages.
Online registration and payment of membership
A fast website even with a high number of visitors
Inspiration based on the location. On detail pages of events/monuments other possibilities in the neighbourhood are presented.
For the administrators:
An advanced CRM system with CiviCRM for the management of members, events and monuments.
The existing members were imported into this new CRM system.
Synchronisation via API of the activities of the partners on UiT in Flanders to openmonumenten.be.
Multi domain: the possibility to have additional websites developed on the same codebase.
A reliable and stable website, thanks to our favourite CMS system: Drupal.
Why Drupal was chosen
An agile approach in this project was indispensable. Our team was flexible and the developers took into account changing circumstances or changing customer requirements. Only thanks to this flexible setup could this tightly timed project succeed. However, the project is not over yet. Because of the abstract architecture of the Drupal platform, Herita can now also place other websites on the same platform. By using the Domain Access setup, content and functionality can easily be shared between web sites.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
CMS: Drupal
Drupal is the ideal open source CMS for realizing a demanding website with high visitor numbers.
CRM system: CiviCRM
For the management of the monuments, events, communication and memberships the link with a CRM system was necessary. For this we chose CiviCRM, an open source CRM system of which Calibrate is an official partner.
Some concrete applications of CiviCRM on the new website:
The link with CiviCRM made it possible to store events and monuments in CiviCRM via a sync of UiT in Flanders. This data is then retrieved, via migrations, in Drupal, where the administrator can enrich the content with photos and additional information. This ensures that Herita's partners can enter the information in UiT and that it flows smoothly to the website.
Visitors can become a member of Herita via the website. The info comes through the website first in CiviCRM, is passed on to Drupal to create an account, and forwarded to UiT for the UiTPas.
Payments: Mollie
When concluding a membership, website visitors must also make a payment. To make this possible, we integrated 'Mollie Payments' on the website. Mollie is installed on the website via a plugin or API in order to be able to offer all important payment methods (Bancontact, Mastercard, Visa...). When making a payment, the transfer is exported and then imported into CiviCRM via the CiviBanking Extension. As mentioned before, Calibrate is official partner of CiviCRM, but also of Mollie.
Search API
We get the information shown on the map from both Drupal and CiviCRM. Something that's not standard in Drupal. To realize this we have integrated the Search API module.
A Search API allows us to collect information from both the CRM and CMS and then merge it into one large search index. On the basis of a migration, we merge this information into a single table. On top of this table we then put a simple controller, which serves to show the information of the events and monuments on the map.
In order to accommodate peak moments during Open Monumentendag and other events, we have devised a custom scalable architecture in consultation with our hosting partner ScaleCity. The result is a container-based cluster solution on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), linked to a robust MySQL Percona server.
During each sprint, ScaleCity always looked at the impact and performance improvements in consultation with ScaleCity.
For example, Varnish is used as a page cache system and Redis is responsible for storing Drupal and CiviCRM cached data.
Also logging functionality has been reworked to relieve MySQL of non-critical data.
To take full advantage of GKE's auto-scaling technology, Drupal and CiviCRM requests are separated using a duplicated HAProxy Load Balancer. Depending on the number of active users on the website and their actions, Drupal and CiviCRM containers are automatically and independently scaled up when needed.
