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By Blau on
Biolaboratorio aroses in 2004 to help scientists and other laboratory professionals to find suppliers of specific brands. At present, it covers most of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries, what means more than 600 millions of citizens. At the beginning of Biolaboratorio, many companies did not have a Webpage and our role was merely to put those companies available in an internet search. Nowadays, the presence at internet has become widespread and the Website has tried to provide more and more useful information. Our main objective has been to allow the full interconnection between international manufacturers, specific manufactured products, and distributors of these products in the countries covered.
Why Drupal was chosen:
We tested different options, but up to our knowledge no other CMS provides the possibility of interconnecting different types of content as Drupal does. In addition, Drupal might allow us to grow in the future, because of its flexibility.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Our aim was to create a multilingual site. Spanish and Portuguese, for our main visitors, and English, to allow international companies to have access to small companies in Latin America, Spain and Portugal. In addition, we wanted to create a full net with the different types of content: manufacturers, distributors, countries, and manufactured and distributed products. We were newbies in Drupal and it was not an easy ride. We constructed a first site in February 2012, but without a real multilingual functionality. Last February, a new version of the site was launched, completely multilingual and with most of the desired content interconnections. We hope to include new features in the next future.
Technical specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
We have only included a selection of the modules used. Many other have been needed to get the final multilingual version (Pathauto, Transliteration, Internationalization SEO hreflang, Views translation, Taxonomy translation,...) and current display (Term Reference Tree, Multiselect, Taxonomy Image, Invisimail,...). Internationalization was used as the main system to get the multilingual functionality, but Entity translation was needed to translate particular fields of content that remains generally unchanged between languages (e.g. companies, including contact information, phones, etc.). Views with other submodules, Display Suite, Field collection, and Taxonomy display child term have been used to create the display, including two different columns in many types of content and a complex tree of lab product taxonomy. CDN is used to increase the speed of the site. It has been connected to Amazon Web Services.
Project team:
Blauplanet.com has designed the basic Website structure, the types of content, taxonomies, etc, and created the whole content of the site. In addition, we have really to stand out the contribution of José Reyero to the last version of Biolaboratorio, particularly in the Multilingual functionality, but also in many other new features of Biolaboratorio.
Sectors:
Community
Manufacturing and Energy
Media
Non-profit
Small business
Startups
