The old Visit Reykjavík site was built on Drupal 7 and it was time for a visual and functional facelift, this is where our team came into the picture.
1xINTERNET has been working on websites for the City of Reykjavík for many years now, and we were entrusted with the backend development of the new VisitReykjavik.is site, in collaboration and close cooperation with the team of Hugsmiðjan, which was responsible of the new beautiful design and the frontend development as well.
If you are wondering why it's important to to upgrade from Drupal 7 to 8 you might want to read this blogpost.
As part of the backend development we recreated and migrated hundreds of nodes from the old site to the new one.
Discover Reykjavik
The new website allows visitors to:
- browse the attractions of City of Reykjavík, including historical sites, various options to try the Icelandic gastronomy, nightlife excitements, etc,
- discover what each region has to offer,
- check out the local events,
- gather practical and useful information before visiting, including details about the City Card,
- read the recent news about Reykjavík,
- and many more.
With the help of the renewed Visit Reykjavík website tourists have all the important information they might need, just at the tip of their fingers, and they can plan their trip easier.
Custom structure for pages
The editors have the freedom to create new pages with the help of paragraphs, which let them to build their content as they want, reuse content elements and customize to every detail. They have various options to highlight specific content, and due to the reusability of the paragraphs a myriad of different pages can be created.
Search
An important part of the website renewal was to make the user experience smooth, and to provide the visitors with all the information they could potentially be interested in.
Since there is a lot of content on the website, we used ElasticSearch on the backend to speed up the search experience. This arranges the search results to sections, so the visitors can filter down for the content types. When redoing the search, the results change without having to reload the page, and they always show the finest results.
Content reorganization and migration
The Drupal 7 site had a lot of content types, which were used in an ineffective way. Not every content type was used, but those which were in use were mixed up for the content editors, so we needed to simplify the admin interface. On the new website the most basic content types are used, and there are a lot of settings to make them easily filterable. In case of the attractions we were working with three levels of categories, and we also introduced the ‘area’ filter option too.
Due to the number of already existing content, after a thorough data restructuring we needed to migrate hundreds of nodes. In some cases it included merging or renaming different content types. In order to have a better user experience, we introduced new taxonomies too, so before going live the editors had to review a lot of pages.
As a result the current content structure is logical, content is easier to find and it can be filtered in many ways.
Challenges
Optimizing the content structure (since the old D7 site had too many content types), migrating the content into the new simplified, but very much different content types, and creating reusable elements, which can be added to the pages and look good all together.
Why Drupal was chosen
The old Visit Reykjavík was built in Drupal 7, and since City of Reykjavík is an avid open source software user, they already had experience in Drupal, so Drupal was an obvious and perfect choice.
Drupal version: Drupal 8
Key modules/theme/distribution used;
Search API
Paragraphs
Stackpath CDN
Migrate
Community contribution and team members
https://www.drupal.org/u/baddysonja
https://www.drupal.org/u/arnarsigurdar
https://www.drupal.org/u/cmd87
https://www.drupal.org/u/nodles
https://www.drupal.org/u/24ma13wg
https://www.drupal.org/u/svitlana
https://www.drupal.org/u/truls1502
