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Smarter is the leading platform for booking the most exquisite vacation rentals in London.

About the project

The goal of this project is to simplify the short-stay vacation rental market, specifically in London. The project aimed to provide users with clarity and confidence when booking luxury vacation rentals by curating the finest, best-reviewed properties.

The main objectives were to:
- accomplish the redesign;
- fix bugs;
- improve performance;
- add new advanced features

In the outcome:
We completely revamped the site's front end with a sleek and contemporary design. We also optimized and improved performance. By integrating Alpine.js into the project, we reduced unnecessary JavaScript code and introduced dynamic elements to enhance the user experience.

We've successfully developed an efficient apartment booking system that ensures availability is accurately displayed to users. Specifically, when users select their desired dates, the system will exclusively show apartments that are currently available, making the booking process seamless and hassle-free.

Our team extensively reworked and optimized many pages and database queries, significantly boosting site speed by configuring resource caching. This resulted in a remarkable performance increase.

We implemented intuitive apartment filtering options based on various criteria and introduced user accounts. Users can now not only edit their personal preferences but also view their saved apartments and set up email notifications for various site activities.

In addition, we addressed numerous critical issues stemming from previous developer oversights, resolving issues in the custom admin panel and coupon system.

One of the most noteworthy enhancements is the introduction of dynamic pricing, which adapts based on rental dates and the number of guests. We also synchronized property listings and their dynamic prices from external sources, ensuring up-to-date and accurate information.

Why Drupal was chosen

We decided to go with Drupal because it boosted efficiency. With a lot of content on our site, Drupal was the ideal choice for quick searches and high performance. It also allowed us to edit and manage our content easily, giving us the freedom and flexibility we needed. Drupal 10 is a powerful platform with user-friendly, responsive, and flexible features.

Handling Extensive Content: Our website contains a vast amount of content, and Drupal's capabilities shine in situations where quick search and high performance are crucial. This was especially important as we wanted our users to find information swiftly and experience seamless performance.

Content Management: Drupal's content management system provided us with the ability to edit and manage our content easily. This meant that the content management team had the freedom and flexibility to keep the website up to date and adapt to changing needs without extensive technical expertise.

Robust Features of Drupal 10: Drupal 10 is known for its robust features and enhancements, making it a user-friendly, responsive, and flexible platform. These improvements not only streamlined our web operations but also made it more appealing to our users.

Scalability: Drupal's ability to scale as our website and business grew was another important factor. It allowed us to accommodate increasing demands without major disruptions or overhauls.

In summary, choosing Drupal 10 was a strategic move that greatly improved our website's performance, content management, and overall user experience, while positioning us well to achieve our business goals.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

A computed field is used to automate the generation of Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) for each object based on specific criteria. These criteria include the city's name (currently London, with plans for future expansion) and the agency responsible for listing the property.

Flag modules are utilized to track user-saved properties.

Our SEO modules are designed for creating meta titles, descriptions, and schema.org micro-markups to optimize search engine visibility.

For payment system integration, we rely on the Stripe API, leveraging custom JavaScript and PHP code. This facilitates booking fund management, including an automatic 50% charge upon booking and the remaining 50% payment two weeks before the arrival date.

To synchronize property listings from our partner's website, we utilize the Migrate Stack, allowing us to obtain detailed reports on the results.

We use REST for configuring an endpoint API that returns search results in JSON format. This API is integral for rendering a map displaying available houses.

To ensure timely and regular synchronizations with numerous third-party services, we rely on the Cron scheduler, specifically utilizing Ultimate Cron as our task scheduler.

For efficient site configuration management, we utilize Config Split to separate configurations between our production and development environments. With Config Ignore, we can exclude specific site configurations, such as web form configurations and form IDs used for Google Tag Manager, from being exported to files.

Our choice of the Gin theme is centered on providing a modern, user-friendly, and enjoyable experience for site editors, enhancing their interaction with the platform.

Paragraphs allow editors to easily create website pages without involving developers.