[Case Study] Developing An App For Recycling Vehicles With Drupal

4 min readOct 8, 2021

Drupal is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) with an active community of users. Every day, millions of people and companies use it to build and update their websites.

In fact, most people use Drupal every day without even knowing it, as many top organizations use Drupal, such as the Government of Australia, the Red Cross, The Economist, the BBC, NBC News, Cisco, Twitter, and many more.

In this article, I am going to talk about a client who selected Drupal CMS for his business and received some amazing beneficial results [Detailed Case Study]. Let’s begin -

An overview of the Client

The client has a UK-based business and has a very humanistic mission: they recycle used and old vehicles and pays a pretty good amount to the owners.

How do they work?

A user submits a request on a website, and then employees from the company show up, pick up the vehicle (Like — car, bike, truck, etc.) and calculate the compensation.

How did he discover a Good Web Development Company?

He is looking for a seamless experience for customers on his website. In order to find the best web development service, he searched on Google. As a result, he came across Galaxy Weblinks Inc., a company that offers custom software development services.

They help you align cutting-edge software development with your business goals. Their mission is to provide high-value technology solutions to their enterprise clients and help them solve their strategic business problems.

I think you’ll be surprised at the technical stack of this headless Drupal project. Here’s what Galaxy Weblinks Inc. did.

Here’s why Drupal was Chosen:

This is what the Client wanted from Galaxy Weblinks Inc. -

Give website managers the ability to build pages on their own.
Make the website SEO-friendly.
Utilize a modern front-end framework to provide customers with a seamless experience.

As a result of their Headless Drupal project, the requirements were met.

Drupal Features:

If you have to pitch Drupal to your clients, tell them about its unique features!

Ready-made architectures for custom functions allow developers to focus on their business logic rather than building features from scratch.
As Drupal 8 is based on Symfony components, the steep learning curve has been reduced: anyone who has experience with PHP can easily pick up Drupal.
The admin dashboard is extremely easy to use. It gives users the ability to customize their data structures without having to deal with low-level queries or ORM (Object-relational mapping). Also, the CMS configuration can be changed from the admin dashboard.
It includes features to import and export active configurations from and to the database.
The admin panel allows for changes (CMS settings, module settings, data) to be transferred between environments (development, test, production).
Support for headless Drupal and API-first approaches.
Drupal is optimized for mobile experiences. There are numerous themes and modules available to build mobile applications.

Would you like to shorten development time and lower the cost? Consider Drupal.

Based on the above objectives, Galaxy Weblinks Inc. developed a project that used the following technical stack:

Web hosting by Amazon
GitLab CI and CRM
Backend with REST API
Next.js as the front-end framework
Integrated third-party services for the following: receiving information about the vehicle using its registration number, locating addresses, and mailing addresses
Used SendinBlue for Email Newsletter

Backend With REST API

The website of the client was developed with Drupal 8. The REST API is built using Contenta CMS distribution, which uses Varnish caching and Memcached.

For the goals, they developed the feature of building custom pages from ready-made blocks, paragraphs.

Here are other added features -

Improve the usability of the website with meta tags.
Pricing for metals in different regions is imported from external sources.
A vehicle’s registration number indicates its ownership.
In addition to managing CRM contacts, SendinBlue integrates with email campaigns via API.
A tested business logic: the website checks the VIN of the vehicle with a given registration number whenever they deal with a vehicle that was already scrapped. It indicates “someone might have entered the wrong number”.

Front-end Application using Next.js

The client’s website uses Next.js server-side rendering and is responsive in design.

The user is shown a page rendered on the server-side first, and then the page is included in the React life cycle on the client-side. The resulting interface provides the user with a quick-loading and more user-friendly interface, enabling quick switching between pages without reloading.

Additionally, all of the above benefits the company’s marketing as well. This client’s website is a Single Page Application, which means that search engines are not able to properly index it; whereas in our case, search engines see a rendered page before all JS scripts have been executed fully.