erdfisch

erdfisch: a Drupal agency from Heidelberg, Germany

We started erdfisch in 2005 and have worked with Drupal ever since, beginning with version 4.5.5. Today we are eleven people working fully remote across Germany: five developers, two project managers, three managing partners.

Drupal is the only platform we work with. Every developer here has at least five years of Drupal experience and most have more than ten, which adds up to 66 years across the team. Our average tenure is seven years and our average client relationship runs five.

What we build

Most of our work is about running many websites from a single Drupal codebase. Over the past four years we developed a module suite for exactly that and released it under GPL on Drupal.org: Sites.

Sites treats domains as content instead of configuration, so editors can launch a new site without a deployment. Content is shared across sites through relations that carry data themselves, which means a single field can be overridden per site while the global version stays untouched. A country team can change a headline without duplicating the article.

The suite grew out of client projects, in this order:

• 2022, Verbraucherzentrale Niedersachsen. A campaign site inside an existing codebase. This is where the idea started: a gatekeeper that decides whether a piece of content belongs to the domain being requested.
• 2024, linexo by WERTGARANTIE. First full production use. Fourteen sites launched in six months, live in time for the Eurobike trade fair. Nominated for the German Splash Awards.
• 2025, Conductix-Wampfler (Delachaux Group). Twenty-six country sites in nineteen languages from one codebase, replacing a Drupal 7 system. Country specific feature sets, site cloning, and a separate server for the Chinese sites.
• 2026, the German consumer advice centres. Scale: 50+ sites, around 160 editorial teams, 58,000 nodes and 21,000 redirects migrated, roughly 70 million visits a year.
• 2026, WERTGARANTIE Group. Five existing country portals moved onto Sites, which showed the architecture can take over an existing multisite setup.

Beyond multisite

OGCB (Open Government Community Builder) turns a standard Drupal installation into a community, knowledge and project platform for public administration. We built it together with DLR, the German Aerospace Center, inside the federal Smart Cities funding programme, and we maintain it. It ships as an install recipe for Drupal 11.1 and up, uses the KERN design system that German public administration has standardised on, and is published under GPL-2.0 on Drupal.org and on openCode.

ULF is our own system for automated Drupal maintenance: Composer and Git based security updates with automated tests and deployments without downtime.

Accessibility is part of how we develop. We test components with axe-core in Storybook while building them, and check pages with WAVE. Automated tools only cover part of WCAG, so we recommend an independent conformance audit and implement its findings. On linexo, Seven Principles audited 55 success criteria against WCAG 2.2 levels A and AA via EN 301 549.

What we do

Consulting before the decision is made, audits of existing projects, relaunches, development, migrations from other systems, version upgrades, design, and long term maintenance. We also take over Drupal projects we did not build, including ones where the documentation went missing. If your platform runs on an older Drupal version, we have done that move many times.

We work to the Drupal coding standards, because someone has to maintain this after us, and it might not be us.

Selected work

• Verbraucherzentralen, the German consumer advice centres: joint multidomain platform on Drupal 11, one federal site, fifteen state sites and several dozen project sites.
• Conductix-Wampfler: global site family across 26 countries.
• WERTGARANTIE and linexo: insurance portals across five countries.
• Tagesschau: the comment platform meta.tagesschau.de, taken over on Drupal 6 and reimplemented on Drupal 9 while it stayed live, with thousands of registered users and millions of comments.
• Trainerakademie Koeln (German Olympic Sports Confederation): learning platform we have built and run since 2011, relaunched in 2021, extended with an AI assistant in 2025.
• German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP): multidomain relaunch, see the case study above.
• Also: edacentrum, Greenpeace Germany, XLeitstelle (Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg), Heidelberg University Graduate Academy.

More on our blog and on LinkedIn.

Talk to us

• Phone: +49 6221 751 560 0
• Email: info@erdfisch.de

Jobs

We hire people who want to go deep on one thing rather than broad on many. Remote or from the Heidelberg office. Jobs at erdfisch