Sector(s)

Project Team

  • 6 developers
  • 1 architect
  • 2 analists
  • tester
  • project lead

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

Community contributions

The public website vdab.be was progressively and transparently moved, in 2014, from handcrafted HTML to a sturdy Drupal 7 CMS in several releases. In 2021 we have completely rebuild and migrated to a new Drupal 9 site to fit VDAB's new digital strategy.

The new site caters for the unemployed and employees (www.vdab.be). Employers (werkgevers.vdab.be) and partners (partners.vdab.be) have their own dedicated sites. The VDAB public website faces quite intense traffic: almost 50 million page-views per month on average with a constant number of active visitors around 3,000 (the sample below right was at 5 o’clock). Active here means at least one new page request in the last minute. More than 50% of the sessions is mobile. Top task in the website is searching for jobs. The ’Vind-een-job’ single-page app on our website homepage is the top destination in Flanders for this task.

The redesigned website also includes a lot of editorial functionalities to personalize content for the authenticated audience and to help the webmasters managing the website in a more user-friendly way.

About the project

The VDAB site has been built in-house, in collaboration with Cegeka. The visible part of the VDAB website doesn’t allow authenticating into Drupal. Due to the amount of visitors Varnish caching servers take away most load from the web servers (Apache).

Visitors on the website can:
• Read content
• React to blogs, polls and e-zine …,
• Submit events and forms of all kinds (f.e. CV reviews)
• Contact VDAB (in several ways)
• Use the embedded single page apps
• Get personalized content once logged in via VDAB's SSO

The editors (admins, writer …) log in on a different url, which leads to the same site but which allows authentication (controlled by a third-party VDAB SSO tool). Furthermore, the website incorporates several angular en preact applications and integrations with several backend systems. It also provides content for these angular and backend applications (content manageable within Drupal but used outside Drupal).

Why Drupal was chosen

• The number of visitors.
• The need for strict security and GDPR compliance.
• The availability of skilled developers.
• Open source, with a big and very committed Drupal community (good support + futureproof choice).
• Managed workflow based on different roles/permissions (web & intranet).
• Integration with a lot of other frontend apps (micro frontends), built by other teams at VDAB.
• Long term flexibility in an ever-changing environment.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

Mainly we choose modules because of their:

  • stability
  • user base
  • re-use amount
  • flexibility
  • security coverage

The mentioned modules are just a minimal list of our frequently used modules.