Sector(s)
Project Team
The site was built and is maintained by FUF // Frank und Freunde, a Drupal agency in Stuttgart, Germany.
Messepark lists 58 shops, restaurants and services on three floors and is in the middle of a renovation. Its new website went live on Drupal 11 in April 2026, in German and English.
About the project
Goals. A redesigned website that presents Messepark the way visitors know it on site, with clear navigation and content the centre's team keeps current.
Requirements and how Drupal meets them.
- Shop directory. Each shop is a node with category (12 taxonomy terms), floor, images and description. The overview filters by category and floor, and menu links open it with a category preselected. Pathauto builds shop URLs from the category, with separate German and English patterns (/shoppen-geniessen/… and /shopping-enjoyment/…).
- Flexible pages. Pages are assembled from 22 Paragraphs types, such as hero slides with video, image sliders, teasers for shops, events, news and jobs, and an interactive site plan.
- Opening hours. A custom module stores weekly hours and date rules for the centre and the INTERSPAR store, including public holidays and special opening days. The same rules feed the "open today" line in the header, the footer, the opening hours table and the holiday list. Editors maintain the rules in the Drupal admin.
- Editorial workflow. Content Moderation with draft, published and archived states applies to pages, shops, events, news, jobs and magazine articles.
- Two languages. Content Translation is enabled for all content types, all paragraph types, images and both vocabularies.
- Media. The Media Library holds about 400 images plus documents and videos. Core image styles scale images to a set of widths and convert them to AVIF and WebP.
- Forms. Contact, voucher reservation and newsletter forms are built from paragraphs. Newsletter sign-ups go to CleverReach through a custom module.
- Old URLs. 95 redirects were created when the site went live, for example from the old /shops-gastro/ paths. Redirect 404 records missing paths that are still requested.
Outcome. The site went live in April 2026 and today runs Drupal 11.3 on PHP 8.4, hosted by FUF. In October 2026 it lists 58 shops in German and 57 in English. FUF continues to maintain the site. In October 2026, for example, the holiday list was extended: it now shows each special day with its opening hours and an optional note instead of only "closed".
Why Drupal was chosen
The relaunch was planned as the digital part of "Messepark 3.0", the centre's renovation. The previous website did not run on Drupal. Drupal was chosen for its editorial model: content is structured, so the centre's team can maintain shops, events and opening hours themselves, and new features can be added later on the same content model.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
- Paragraphs: editors build pages from 22 component types instead of fixed templates, forms included.
- Pathauto and Token: readable, language-specific URLs derived from the title and, for shops, the category.
- Redirect: keeps links to the previous site working; Redirect 404 shows missing paths that are still requested.
- Linkit: editors pick internal link targets from existing content in CKEditor 5.
- Editor Advanced Link: additional link attributes in the full HTML text format.
- Media Library Edit: media items can be edited directly from the media field.
- Menu Link Attributes: CSS classes, container classes and link targets on menu links.
