Drupal Multisite for a leading Distribution Network Operator in Poland
Project type
New website
Industry
Energetics
Technologies
Apache Solr
Drupal
Tailwind CSS
Typescript
VarnishScope of work
Web development, content migration, post-implementation support
Key Project Elements
- Maintaining a unified technology stack across the Enea Group using Drupal Multisite
- Optimizing time and costs for editorial and support work across both websites
- A simplified workflow for editors through a unified page editing interface
- Ensuring image consistency across the Enea and Enea Operator websites
About the Client
Enea Operator is one of Poland's four largest Distribution Network Operators (DNOs), primarily serving the country's northwestern region. The company manages electricity distribution, grid maintenance and expansion, and fault resolution, ensuring a continuous supply to nearly 3 million customers.
The Challenge
The client was struggling with a significant lack of unity between the Enea and Enea Operator websites. They appeared as disconnected entities, confusing users and damaging the company’s brand image. Users found navigation unintuitive and easily got lost between the sites, which caused frustration and eroded brand trust. Instead of perceiving Enea as one unified group, they saw organizational chaos. Furthermore, a key requirement was to build the website for straightforward management by editors, while also leveraging the existing solutions and framework from the company’s main website, enea.pl.
The Goal
Our goal was to build a visually and technologically coherent ecosystem encompassing the enea.pl and operator.enea.pl websites. A key aspect was reconciling unification with the technical autonomy of both sites. While implementing a common management panel for editors, we had to configure both websites so that changes on one site would not impact the other (allowing them to share a common codebase while operating on separate databases). Simultaneously, maintaining high page load speeds and ensuring full WCAG compliance for both sites were top priorities.
The Solution
We implemented the Enea Operator website as a multi-installation of the main enea.pl site. This approach enabled extensive code and functionality reuse, significantly accelerating the implementation timeline and reducing overall costs for the client.
Both websites share the same, proven technological stack:
- Tailwind CSS and Single Directory Components – ensured visual unity and facilitated further website development;
- Varnish – served as an efficient caching system, ensuring high performance and page loading speed;
- TypeScript – guaranteed greater stability and facilitated JavaScript management.
We built the Enea Group website on Drupal, so the choice was simple. Drupal Multisite was the natural, most logical solution. It allowed us to treat the new Enea Operator website as a “twin” installation. This meant sharing the same code, modules, and functionalities as enea.pl. Instead of building everything from scratch, we could reuse existing components, ensuring technological consistency, reducing implementation time, and minimizing costs. Simultaneously, we provided a unified website editing system with a single administration panel, significantly accelerating the editorial team's daily work.
Solution Details
Multisite
The multi-installation approach proved to be the ideal strategy for building these 'twin' websites. Thanks to that, we achieved a consistent look and structure across the sites, while also utilizing the existing enea.pl codebase. This allowed us to leverage the same features and configuration options, significantly speeding up development time.
This approach streamlines support for both sites – all changes, updates, and development activities can be implemented jointly without duplication of effort. Simultaneously, the Enea Operator website retained its autonomy to build subpages or use individual modules, thanks to a separate database.
New Paragraphs
During the development of the new Enea Operator website, we introduced several new content presentation modules. We designed these to align with the main Enea website as well, enabling a much richer, more flexible display of information across both platforms.
Statistics
876
12
7
The Effects
The client now has a modern website that is fully consistent with the Enea Group's main site
Thanks to the multisite approach, the Enea and Enea Operator websites share the same codebase. This enables us to leverage the technological stack and structure, simplifying the addition of new functions across both sites in the future.
See what else we achieved:
Technological unity across key Enea Group websites.
Improved editor workflow by enabling editing of both sites from a single administration panel.
Improved user experience thanks to a refreshed, consistent design.
Easier access to information through an enhanced search engine.
Enhanced editing capabilities by leveraging shared page layout elements across both sites.
Optimized implementation costs and daily editorial work on both websites.
Reduced support and development costs thanks to multi-installation.
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