Calier is one of the companies of the grupoindukern.com group, along with the well-known kernpharma.com. Calier is a veterinary laboratory present in more than 80 countries through its 12 subsidiaries.
They have production plants in Spain, Colombia, Morocco and Uruguay at the forefront of manufacturing pharmacological and biological products.
When they asked Omitsis to create the website, they had very clear objectives in mind:
Infrastructure by subsidiary
To have a website for Calier International (calier.com) and be able to easily replicate it for its subsidiaries, which would be hosted by default as a folder from Calier International. For example: calier.com/italy.
Additionally, that at any time a subsidiary could be moved to an independent domain. For example: calier.it
Migrate from Liferay to Drupal
Their website was on Liferay and was giving them many problems. Random 500 errors or sometimes only partial errors and images or CSS wouldn’t load properly.
Additionally, the license costs were very high, especially compared to Drupal, which are 0.
Secondary objectives
Additionally, they also wanted to have a blog, improve SEO, improve and harmonize the graphic line of Calier International and the subsidiaries.
To achieve these objectives we mainly took these steps
Page creation using components
To achieve great flexibility we created most of the pages using components (paragraphs) and the layout paragraphs module. Following the design we defined a paragraph for each component, each with different variations, each with a different view mode.
This allows great flexibility and power, to create the initial design and to add new sections without having to program or design anything new, just using the defined components. New components can always be created, but it’s usually not necessary and makes the website evolution have a very low cost.
This is ideal for large and medium-sized companies, because their website usually evolves and grows a lot over time. And having a low growth cost makes the total cost of the website decrease considerably.
Migration from Liferay to Drupal
As we mentioned before, the previous website was on Liferay. This had several problems:
- License costs, which with Drupal drop to 0 (GPL license)
- Previous Liferay website with many problems
- Use of different stacks and CMS’s in the company. In Grupo Indukern, kernpharma.com and grupoindukern.com had already moved to Drupal, so it made sense to continue unifying stacks (Liferay works with Java and Drupal with php) and CMS.
To perform the migration, their previous provider gave us a CSV
Uikit
As a framework we chose Uikit (Uikit Theme in Drupal) since it allows great flexibility and great out-of-the-box functionality.
Modular page
To create modular pages we used paragraphs and layout paragraphs. This allows us to create different types of components that are then available to the webmaster. In the order they want, each with its fields: title, subtitle, link, etc.
And using layout paragraphs being able to insert components within components. For example a two-column layout that within the first column has a call to action and in the second an image.
Each component (paragraphs) has some default CSS attributes: margins, paddings, background color, background image, width, etc. And the webmaster when creating the paragraphs can override these default values with paragraph fields by assigning them classes, which are what actually change the CSS attributes.
We do this through the classy paragraphs module that allows creating a field that will enable activating classes that are then applied directly to the paragraph.
Blog
Calier was very clear that they wanted a section to get traffic, using all the expertise of their team, so we also created a blog, with a listing of articles and a detail page for each article.
Press room
Similarly, for articles more focused on Calier, we created a press room section, with functionalities similar to the blog.
Product compendium
A very important section for the website was being able to display Calier’s product compendium. For this purpose we created a product content type and views with filters.
It’s worth noting that products could have leaflets in PDF format, and we added a watermark on the fly. To achieve this we used the FPDI and FPDI PDF-Parser library.
Pages only for professionals – modal
For legal reasons for pharmaceutical products, the user must be asked beforehand if they are a professional user and if not, they cannot see the content.
For this we show a modal that asks you if you are a professional: clicking yes hides the modal, clicking no goes to the previous page on the site if there was one or to the main page.
Compendium with species/therapeutic line alias. Action to create these aliases
So that the compendium views would have friendly URLs and when combining several taxonomy terms, we created an action to create an alias for each pair of species term and therapeutic line term.
Calier app for veterinarians
This could be a completely independent case study, due to the breadth of features and functionalities this section has. But we’ll summarize it by saying that it’s an intranet for veterinarians, a tool to track the vaccination follow-up of Calier’s client veterinarians.
The tool is a test, with yes/no questions and image questions, mainly and with a mobile-adapted style, that looks like an app.
Once veterinarians have answered, a report is generated that their supervisor finishes filling out with comments and it’s sent back to the veterinarian, so they can improve how they use vaccines.
