The Irish Times, founded in 1859, is Ireland's leading quality newspaper and delivers news, opinion, and analysis to 1,451,000 readers each week. The Irish Times Group now operates multiple brands and regional newspapers.
The Group’s online subscription process suffered from significant inefficiencies. Each of their three websites operated independently, with custom-built systems that were costly to maintain. Every single promotional landing page required a lengthy development cycle, sometimes taking months to create. They also lacked integration with their subscription management platform and needed a modern, streamlined solution for B2B and B2C subscriptions.
Centarro consolidated The Irish Times Group's subscription websites into a unified Drupal Commerce platform serving all three domains. The solution integrated seamlessly with eSuite for subscription management, enabled rapid content creation, and supported complex validation for delivery zones, student verification, and international compliance requirements.
“Drupal Commerce proved to be an excellent and flexible choice for the Irish Times Group and Centarro were amazing implementation partners.”
- Ruairi Roddy, Commercial Product Manager, Irish Times Group.
About the project
Offering the right options to potential customers
The Irish Times offers both print and digital subscriptions, but physical newspapers can only be delivered to certain geographic areas. Only valid options should be shown to potential customers. The new platform validates delivery zones for print subscriptions in real time. When customers enter their postal code, the system automatically populates addresses and checks delivery availability, providing customized messaging based on delivery schedules (weekday, weekend, or no delivery available). Customers only see products they can actually purchase.
The validation is particularly sophisticated for the News Delivery aggregation service, which sells multiple publications with different delivery schedules and associated delivery zones. The system validates each selected publication variation against the customer's specific address, checking that every item in their cart can actually be delivered to their location.
Leveraging composable commerce
We leveraged Drupal Commerce’s composability to integrate multiple third-party systems:
- eSuite for subscription and account management
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud for email communications
- Custom middleware for payment processing
eSuite remains the authoritative source for all data. User authentication happens against eSuite credentials, with Drupal creating only a local user record containing email and basic profile information. All detailed customer information, subscription history, and payment details are retrieved via real-time API calls rather than being stored in Drupal. This architecture enables the GDPR compliance strategy while maintaining full functionality.
Password reset emails and system notifications aren't sent directly from Drupal. Instead, Drupal contacts a middleware layer, which then triggers Salesforce Marketing Cloud to send the actual emails. This ensures all customer communications are centrally managed through Salesforce while maintaining proper functionality for standard user account workflows.
Three brands, one system
The platform uses Drupal's Domain module to serve three different domains from a single codebase: subscribe.irishtimes.com, irishexaminer.com, and ie.irishexaminer.com. Each domain maintains its own theme, branding, and specific functionality while sharing core commerce and content management capabilities. Each brand maintains distinct characteristics:
- Different product catalogs and pricing structures
- Unique promotional strategies and landing page designs
- Brand-specific checkout flows and messaging
- Separate customer communication preferences
- Distinct delivery zones and service areas
The unified platform eliminates the technical debt of maintaining three separate systems while reducing hosting, maintenance, and development costs. Updates and new features can be deployed across all brands simultaneously, while domain-specific overrides allow for brand autonomy when needed.
New component library speeds up content creation for marketers
Previously, every promotional page required a full cycle of design, rounds of approvals from multiple stakeholders, revisions, and finally custom development. A single page could take months to get published.
We helped build a component library for Drupal’s Layout Builder. Marketing teams can select products from a searchable interface, customize promotional messaging, and preview results in real-time. Most importantly, they can do all of this without touching code or requiring developer intervention. The library enforces brand consistency through default text patterns that pull from eSuite data, while allowing approved customizations through override fields.
The Irish Times can now respond to market opportunities in real-time, test promotional concepts quickly, and iterate based on performance–capabilities that were impossible under the old system.
GDPR-compliant data management
User data in Drupal is purged after 60 days of inactivity, and order data after 7 days. All customer data is sourced from eSuite in real-time, ensuring compliance while maintaining full functionality.
The architecture allows for seamless account recreation when purged accounts return. When a deleted user logs in again, the system creates a fresh Drupal user account and immediately pulls all relevant data from eSuite. No functionality is lost while keeping a minimal data footprint in the Drupal database. Only essential information required for session management is stored in Drupal, with all detailed customer information, subscription history, and payment data remaining in eSuite.
Why Drupal was chosen
The Irish Times Group evaluated multiple platforms, including Shopify Plus, before selecting Drupal Commerce. Several factors drove this decision.
- Composability and integration - Drupal Commerce is designed to be composable, so you can assemble the best tools for the job. It can integrate with multiple services and data sources while getting its own systems out of the way. This project had several deep integrations. eSuite serves as the source of truth for all product, customer, and billing data. Salesforce Marketing Cloud controls email communications. A custom payment middleware is used instead of the default Commerce payment process.
- Unlimited customization capability - The platform requires several customer workflows for different customer types and products. B2C, B2B, gift redemptions, student verifications, digital and physical subscriptions, dynamic pricing, and more.
- Cost and control - The client did not want to be locked into specific third-party services or face escalating licensing fees as their needs evolved. They maintain complete control over their data and business logic.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
The Domain module routes the user to the proper subscription page and activates the right promotion(s) and checkout flow based on the URL. Bootstrap Layout Builder was used to help build the responsive component library for the marketing team.
