TYPO3 website relaunch for HessenChemie

Employers' Association for the Chemical and Related Industries for Land Hessen e.V.

Hand wearing a white glove holding a test tube

"The upgrade from 10.4 to 12.4 went smoothly, was uncomplicated and professional. We also feel very well looked after and well advised at all times with the ongoing support of the website by dkd. Thank you very much for the very pleasant cooperation!"

Jürgen Funk,Managing Director, Association Communications & Political Public Relations

HessenChemie is the employers' association for the chemical, pharmaceutical and plastics processing industry in Hesse. It represents the interests of 310 member companies with a total of 105,000 employees. The association offers comprehensive services in the areas of collective bargaining policy, legal advice, human resources development and training in order to ensure competitive working conditions and the future viability of the industry.

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Our To-Do List

Development, communication, support, consulting, responsive design, mobile, newsletter TYPO3 upgrade/update, TYPO3 extension updates, refraction, SSO connection

Challenge

The main challenge for the HessenChemie website relaunch was upgrading TYPO3 from version 10.4.x to 12.4.x. This involved technically revising and refactoring 16 individually developed extensions. At the same time, the front-end framework had to be converted from Bootstrap 4.6 to 5.3, and existing content element extensions based on Atomic Design with Storybook had to be migrated. To optimise performance, the frontend had to be converted to Webpack. The local development environment had to be migrated to DDEV and adapted. In addition, CI/CD processes for the staging and production environment were designed and configured with Deployer. Hosted Solr was used for the search function.

Solution

As part of the relaunch, an oAuth-based SSO connection with front-end user synchronisation to an external dialogue platform was implemented. Data exchange with this platform now takes place via a newly developed API extension. The existing direct_mail extension was made compatible with TYPO3 12.4.x and supplemented with an extension for the individual preparation and control of newsletters. In addition, new modules were developed for managing and ordering publications, self-managing subscriptions, and handling events, including contact persons, speakers, and participants. An additional extension now allows multiple people to be booked per transaction. Content can now be generated and provided directly as PDF files in accordance with defined style specifications.

Initial situation

Existing design concept for the website
Existing TYPO3 application of the main page
Synergy effects through integration of existing content elements from the main page