Our technical architect Peter Bridger tells us about the exciting work we’re doing with one of the UK’s best-loved pub retailer and brewers.
Every year Umbraco developers, editors and creatives from throughout the UK and beyond journey to London for the annual UK Umbraco Festival. This year is the 10th anniversary of what has become the largest community-organised Umbraco event.
It features talks from many people in the community who are eager to share their experience on a wide range of topics. I spoke about my experiences working with Greene King to migrate a number of its key brands (notably www.greeneking-pubs.co.uk, www.hungryhorse.co.uk, www.chefandbrewer.com) to a single Umbraco-powered codebase.
Greene King has a rich 200-year history and is the UK’s largest pub chain and brewer, operating 3,100 pubs, restaurants and hotels. In recent years several acquisitions have left Greene King with digital portfolio powered by a variety of CMS platforms.
Our challenge was to build a flexible toolkit that would empower Greene King’s digital team to effectively manage content and campaigns across their hundreds of pubs.
Zone has been an Umbraco Gold partner for many years, meaning that we knew exactly what we could use and extend within the CMS to meet this objective.
One key technique we used was to make use of automation and tap into data sources where possible, to reduce the amount of manual labour required by the editors.
A scheduled job pulls into data from Greene King about each of the pubs it operates, providing information on the address, opening times, facilities and many other details. Rather than store all this information directly in Umbraco, it’s held in a separate document database. If any new pubs are detected during the import, an event will be raised on a queue that will trigger Umbraco to automatically create the new pub node within the CMS, with a reference back to pub data held in the document database.
This approach frees the editors from having to manually update hundreds of pubs in the CMS, while also allowing geospatial searches to be easily achieved through a separate microservice API.
We made full use of Umbraco’s Content Finders tool to eliminate content duplication when an editor needs to run a campaign across multiple pubs. In essence it provides a way of intercepting a request for a specific page in the CMS and allows custom logic to provide another page of content instead.
This meant we could create a single campaign page for Valentine’s Day, which was then served multiple times as a virtual child page of all the pubs.
To provide further personalisation of content under each pub we introduced the ability to add tokens into content. This allowed a pub’s name or telephone number to be automatically inserted, again reducing the workload of an editor.
This ability worked well with the Personalisation Groups package, created by Zone’s very own Umbraco MVP, Andy Butland, to provide further personalisation of content.
Umbraco continues to grow in popularity and enjoys a wide ranging number of packages that have been created by the community. Attending the various meetups and festivals held by community members is a great chance to share what I’ve learned — and learn from the adventures of others.
