Sector(s)

Team Members

gcalex5, shauntyndall, veronicaseveryn, Bryan Cordrey, inclindamy

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

Community contributions

Address module submitted a patch to get Feeds support started:
https://www.drupal.org/project/address/issues/2882589

Geolocation Field submitted a patch to add feeds support and was accepted:
https://www.drupal.org/node/2947042

Used some of what was learned from this and past projects to add a documentation for Feeds detailing some code examples for creating custom Feeds integrations:
https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/modules/feeds/creating-a-custom-feeds-wor…

RentABeach is the brainchild of Fred Sheffield, an entrepreneur and innovator who created an algorithm that pulls rental listing information and indexes it all onto one website.Vacationers headed to the North Carolina and Virginia coasts can use RentABeach.com to search and request reservations for their perfect beach rental without visiting multiple websites.

RentABeach had grown exponentially in listings over the years, but wasn’t scalable to meet user search demands. It was time to take it to the next level of search speed and expand the searching capabilities to better serve visitors and rental agencies.

The Inclind team helped to engineer the more improved search function:

  • by implementing a power combo of decoupled Drupal 8, Angular, and Apache Solr as the search engine
  • by driving traffic via webforms to RentABeach’s rental agency sites, rather than other rental agency sites, by syncing all data and rental property info into a single site;
  • by improving the search user experience with filtering capabilities that would allow users to more easily focus on the properties tailored to their needs and wants.

The project was executed within a short completion timeline to ensure the new site could serve visitors ready to book for the upcoming summer season.

When asked why he chose team Inclind, Sheffield remarked, “I met with CEO Shaun Tyndall a year ago to talk through the requirements and felt good about his interest in the challenge.“

About the project

Our main goals for Rentabeach.com was to retain SEO from the pre-existing site, to speed up the site search to a near instant response and to leverage the website as a mobile website, or progressive web app (PWA).

Project Outcome
Rentabeach.com is now a website of 10,000+ listings that delivers search results in mere milliseconds, along with a better user experience – particularly on mobile. We designed and combined an Angular search function with the Drupal software that has improved search speeds by 2,000%. And with the new Drupal 8 layout builder, the client can also easily create landing pages to drive traffic and improve conversions.

“I’m very excited about the speed and the capabilities of the new site and it’s a ton of pressure off of me to have a team behind me providing support,” said Fred. “I really enjoyed working with the Inclind team, which definitely has the customer’s best interest in mind and wants to deliver what they need.”

Inclind continues to maintain, monitor and support the site.

Why Drupal was chosen

Drupal provided a flexible framework to start with to pull data in and index it into the Solr engine. It also worked nicely alongside a decoupled Angular experience by feeding it information for the search experience.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen
  • Decoupled Angular for a fast/responsive search framework
  • Feeds for a framework to sync data into Drupal from their API
  • Webform
  • Search API & Search API Solr provided 99% of what was needed to index the data into Solr for Angular to read/search from