Sector(s)

Team Members

mheip, peterlemmens, mallezie, Wesleyv

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Organizations Involved

Community contributions

Knauf Insulation is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of insulation products and solutions. With more than 40 years of experience in the insulation industry, they represent one of the fastest growing and most respected names in insulation worldwide. Knauf employs over 5,000 people in more than 35 countries. They have 37 manufacturing sites in 15 countries, with a strong and steady financial performance with turnover exceeding €1.7 billion in 2017.

Their mission is to challenge conventional thinking and create innovative insulation solutions that shape the way we live and build in the future, with care for the people who make them, the people who use them and the world we all depend on.

About the project

Knauf Insulation wanted a multi-site, while still giving all the countries plenty of options to configure themselves. For this reason, iO chose the following approach:

  • One code repository
  • One theme
  • Separate configuration and databases

By keeping the configuration and databases separate, we were able to make sure all content, users, products etc. were available for the specific country only. Users/content/products would not get in the way of users/content/products from other countries. While we do have base configuration we could still overwrite specific needs for a country. As a simple example, the date/time notation can differ from country to country.

With one code & theme, all countries are operating with the same functionalities. When adding or updating features they are always available for all countries. When improving theming, all countries would have the same changes, meaning the look & feel can be preserved and maintained over all the country websites. While all websites are being managed separately, we still get the feel they are all part of the same company/website.

All countries also have their own product set or product availability. We created a separate Symfony platform that would act as a PIM system. All products, product properties, images, downloads and so on became centralized while still giving the countries the options to define their own exclusions or own product sets. With the use of Elasticsearch, we index products and make them available as remote entities in the Drupal websites.

As we stand now, we have almost 40 countries active on the platform, all using the same functionalities and the same approach on adding content, products, downloads and so on. With planned deploys and regular status updates, all content managers get new and improved features on their website, regulated and coordinated by Knauf Insulation Central and iO.

Why Drupal was chosen

Knauf Insulation is active in more than 35 countries. Each country previously had its own Drupal 7 installation, managed its own website and made its own changes. Quickly enough, a lot of projects went their own way. Code and content became harder and harder to maintain since there was no central guidance or maintenance.

For the development of the new websites, a few requirements were set:

  • Reworked look & feel matching the new tagline “Challenge, create, care”
  • Multisite setup with one code base
  • Each country should be able to manage its own content
  • Product data, specific per country, provided by a PIM system Drupal 9.5 seemed the perfect fit for this project.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen
  • Config split to create new functionalities for certain sites
  • Workspaces to add a better publishing flow
  • Purge to use varnish functionality
  • Simple sitemap for better sitemaps
  • System tags to tag important pages and create references between them
  • Webform for form creation