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By Full Fat Things on
Established in 1936, Contactum is a British manufacturer of electrical accessories and circuit protection. With a product range of over 6000 items, they’re a manufacturing leader in the UK.
Contactum first approached Full Fat Things in October 2020. They wanted to upgrade their site from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9, along with improvements to its functionality and performance. Maintaining the highest level of security was critical.
The site is now fully upgraded to Drupal 9. Updating product information is more streamlined for site editors and Contactum’s customers enjoy a greater user experience. We continue to maintain the site and perform security updates to keep the highest level of performance and security that Contactum initially requested.
Why Drupal was chosen:
The Contactum site was previously built in Drupal 7. The goals of this work include better performance and higher security, so upgrading to Drupal 9 was the clear path to achieving these goals.
A better performance on the site could only have been achieved through utilising Drupal modules which have driven the upgrade to be as successful as it was.
The Drupal modules we used to help seamlessly transition to Drupal 9, include:
Through the work we delivered on the Contactum site, we implemented patches in Drupal core, as well as contributing to modules such as the Location Migration and the Elasticsearch Connector.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Contactum’s original goal for this project was to improve website performance and security. This was to demonstrate that Contactum is the leading electrical accessories manufacturer in the UK, through a better user experience and highly detailed product information.
As a result, we carried out the following work and improvements:
With the Drupal 7 end-of-life date looming, Contactum wanted to upgrade their systems before the EOL date to maintain their optimum performance, and security. Using the Migrate Drupal and Migrate Upgrade modules, we seamlessly imported all the content from their existing site.
The transition from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 can seem like a vast change. In reality, the site now has all the benefits of Drupal 9, but still feels like the same site. With the same structured content based system, Contactum now has a more advanced site that works similarly to their previous site. Their processes and editing functions work the same way, but with even better performance, keyboard navigation and accessibility.
Contactum used the Drupal Feeds module in their Drupal 7 site to import their product information management data.
While upgrading their site to Drupal 9, we optimised the way this module worked so that product fields are automatically filled with the product information management data. Updating product information is now more streamlined and efficient, saving website editors an enormous amount of time.
The existing search engine on the Contactum site worked well already, but was only achieving results from exact searches. We implemented Elasticsearch on the site to allow for much more advanced search results, improving the customers’ user experience.
Elasticsearch works great with Drupal sites and is really flexible enough to allow for future improvements and features. We implemented Elasticsearch using the Elasticsearch Connector module to integrate seamlessly on the site.
The site wasn’t previously optimised to work across mobile devices, which Contactum recognised as a lost opportunity to boost sales.
We enabled the site to be responsive across all devices, including mobile. The responsive design means a wider customer base can now access the site and product information easily from their phone, without the need for a laptop or desktop computer.
One of Contactum’s great strengths is having hundreds of distributors of their products around the UK. Contactum wanted to optimise their distributor map function, which would only show results when searching for the exact distributor location. We implemented the function to allow the search results to show distributors within a 5-mile radius of a location.
Using the GeoLocation module and the Location Migration module, we migrated the Distributor map to the Drupal 9 site and made significant improvements on its functions for a better user experience.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 9.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Community contributions:
Location Migration, Elasticsearch Connector, Drupal core
Organizations involved:
Sectors:
Manufacturing and Energy
