Ferlito/van der Wyk developed a Drupal 7 site for Transcendia, an industrial manufacturing company located in Illinois, USA employing over 500 people worldwide in over twenty locations.
About the project
Transcendia formerly Transilwrap, is an industrial manufacturing company located in Illinois, USA employing over 500 people worldwide in over twenty locations. Transcendia worked with The Pepper Group to develop a new design for a relaunch of the company. The Pepper Group came to Ferlito/van der Wyk to implement the design and bring the site to reality.
Working with an eight week timeframe we were able to start at the wireframe stage. The wireframes helped us develop the content types, blocks and fields that would eventually make us the site. Transcendia has a rich product offering of over 200 products so we made full use of Drupal 7's taxonomy system to categorize products, over 400 data sheets and sell sheets for ease of browsing and searching.
Theming
Pepper's design heralded a rebranding of the company including a new company name and logo. The design was striking with bold color choices and rich photographic material.
We used the Foundation Drupal theme available on drupal.org as the base for our custom theme. We used Display Suite extensively to customize view modes and field markup, simplifying wherever possible. For background images and icons set in the theme, we used SVG. We look forward to the day when Drupal file fields support SVG.
The SCSS modular structure found in the theme helped us code efficiently, collaborate well, and handle sweeping design changes such as global color scheme edits quickly and easily.
We used our design and UX expertise to adapt the widescreen designs for narrow and touch screens.
Migration
We migrated the entire product suite from a legacy site using the Feeds module. Pepper provided us with well organized CSV files and Feeds and Feeds Tamper handle CSV content very well. We were impressed with the ability of Feeds to handle entity references and rollbacks cleanly and easily. In addition we found Feeds Import Preview and Feeds Debug Tamper to be extremely useful in ironing out various edge cases. Feeds obviated the need for the complexity of the Migrate module or custom migration code.
Locations
We created an interactive map of all the Transcendia facilities around the world. The map reinforces the international reach of the company. Drupal's flexibility shined in this task. We were able to bring together several modules including Location, Address, Views, Leaflet, Leaflet More Maps and others to create an easy to use responsive location map. We added custom locations markers and custom-styled tooltips to fit with the site's overall design.
Challenges
With only days left to launch the client requested a home page revamp and a new color scheme for the entire site. Using the power of Sass we were able to quickly adapt the theme to the new design.
The new site is flexible and suits the needs of the client, can be easily updated with new products, datasheets and sellsheets.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was chosen because of its wide variety of contributed modules and community support.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Ferlito/van der wyk had a great understanding of Foundation. By using it again we were able to build on our experience and library of front end code.
We chose Paragraphs for its ability to break up the large body field into individual fieldable pieces. We see Paragraphs as an evolutionary step forward in Drupal content creation experience.
We chose Feeds for its power and flexibility in handling data.
We chose Leaflet because of speed and beautiful maps.
