Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
WOAR! Ohne Angst & Reue — concept, UX, design, Drupal development,
multisite architecture, multilingual setup, ongoing maintenance.
Karl Michels GmbH & Co. KG is one of the leading logistics companies in
the Rhine-Moselle region of Germany, providing freight forwarding and
transport services for several decades. SiLog GmbH is its subsidiary.
Both companies ran separate websites that had aged badly: technically
outdated, hard to maintain, and no longer extensible. The two brands
needed a shared technical foundation while keeping distinct content,
navigation and visual identity — and the whole thing had to work in
German, English and French for international freight customers.
About the project
Goals
- One technical foundation for two brands, separately editable
- Three languages with equal editorial quality
- Individual layouts per page, buildable by editors
- A filterable overview of the logistics service portfolio
- Low maintenance effort for a client with no in-house IT
Approach
The project was rebuilt from scratch on Drupal 10 as a multisite. Both
sites share the same core, modules and layout system; content is kept
strictly separate. A configuration concept keeps what must differ
per site (theming, menus, some content types) apart from what should
stay central.
Editorial flexibility comes from Layout Builder together with Layout
Paragraphs: every element — text, image, custom section layouts — can
be freely combined. The services overview uses Views with exposed
filters so visitors can narrow down logistics solutions instead of
scrolling a long list.
The company history page uses a custom timeline slider component,
built specifically for this project.
Outcome
- 1 codebase, 2 brands
- 3 languages (DE / EN / FR)
- Page structures fully composable by the editorial team
- Central maintenance and updates for both sites at once
Why Drupal was chosen
Three requirements pointed to Drupal rather than a single-site CMS.
First, multisite. Two brands, one codebase. Drupal's multisite
architecture lets both sites share core, contributed modules, paragraph
types and layout logic while keeping content, configuration and theming
separate. Maintenance happens once instead of twice — which matters for
a client without an IT department.
Second, multilingual. German, English and French with full content
translation, including translated menus, taxonomy and paragraph
content. Drupal handles this in core rather than through a bolt-on
plugin, and the editorial workflow stays the same in every language.
Third, editorial freedom without developers. The client needed to build
individual page layouts for a large and growing service portfolio.
Layout Builder combined with Layout Paragraphs gives editors free
composition of sections without touching templates or requesting
development work for every new page.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Layout Paragraphs was chosen over plain Layout Builder alone because it
gives editors a paragraph-based authoring experience inside layout
sections — closer to how non-technical editors think about a page.
Better Exposed Filters turns the services Views listing into a usable
filter interface without custom front-end work.
Content Translation in core handles the DE/EN/FR requirement including
paragraph and menu translation, which avoids a contributed
multilingual stack.
Klaro was used for consent management because it is open source, has a
maintained Drupal module, and lets analytics and third-party scripts be
gated properly per category.
The theme is custom and deliberately slim — the layout flexibility
lives in the paragraph and layout configuration, not in the theme.
