The Partner Widget is a B2B application that we originally created in 2013 and launched in 2014: as the leading provider of hotel reviews in German-speaking countries, the HolidayCheck AG provides their enormous database of reviews via a REST API to travel businesses that are partners of HolidayCheck. The original goal of the project was to provide a simple mechanism for partners to integrate data from HolidayCheck into their own websites without the need to develop an own application that connects to the API and renders the data.
After four years of successful service, we were asked to completely overhaul HolidayCheck’s Partner Widget and to add a new feature to the project. Besides implementing a new theme that reflects the corporate design (which had changed in the meanwhile) and new responsive design features, we developed an email reminder service for hotel guests.
About the project
The Partner Widget consists of two parts: a page to display hotel reviews (and media like image galleries) and a form that allows users to summit new reviews for a given hotel. The partners can integrate both of them either via an iframe or in a popup.
The display of reviews has been completely re-worked to match the current styleguide of HolidayCheck’s corporate design and improved in terms of responsive web design.
The form for submitting reviews has been optimized to collect all data in few, simple steps that are also usable with joy on mobile devices. Once all data is collected and validated by the drupal form, it is sent to the API endpoint to create a new hotel review.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal once again proved to be a highly flexible allrounder: this Drupal site keeps only information about the relevant partners (access rights and configuration). When a Partner Widget is requested, Drupal utilizes the built-in HTTP client to communicate with HolidayCheck’s API to retrieve the relevant information and renders it as an HTML document.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Besides the drupal core, bootstrap and views, only a couple of custom modules were used (mainly the API connector)
