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By Specbee on
Barbeque Nation is one of the largest premium restaurant chains with branches in India and the Middle East. Their focus has been to provide the best quality food along with the best customer experience whether online or at their restaurants.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Barbeque Nation has restaurants at over 140 locations. Their customers needed to be provided a pleasant and uniform online experience no matter which location they wished to reserve a table at, they dined at or wished to order food delivery from.
We wanted to leverage the powerful features of Drupal 8 in order to serve as a Front-end platform that would serve a compelling experience to their customers. This Drupal 8 based platform would also act as an engine that would connect and interwork various restaurant management components to enable the experience that was required in the Front end.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Barbeque Nation is a market leader in their space and is known for their technology-driven innovations. This website/application was intended to provide an experience like no other and further cement their place in the market. The project included the development of a platform:
- That interacted with the web, mobile app, POS front end on one side and all the various existing restaurant/customer management modules on the other side.
- That enabled the Barbeque nation customers to make reservations, buy coupons, avail offers, make payments, view menus, and do a host of other functions using the mobile app and website.
- That enabled Barbeque Nation to quickly launch new marketing, loyalty initiatives, change menus, etc. such that these would take effect on individual restaurants, group of restaurants, or globally based on certain configurable criteria.
Specbee was entrusted with the whole platform build and development of the web front end for the project.
Biggest Challenges:
There were 2 big challenges we faced:
- Integration with existing restaurant management components: To achieve project goals, the Drupal platform we were building needed to integrate with components such as their existing CRM, Centralized reservation system, POS systems, voucher management systems, etc. Some of these systems were rigid in the way they worked and had an API set that couldn't be altered with.
- Barbeque Nation could serve millions of visitors per month with huge holiday spikes. This meant the platform we were building needed to be built such that it could easily serve that capacity and scale in a seamless way as needed to serve the massive traffic.
How we addressed the challenges
We detailed and storyboarded every scenario that was possible. We then identified points of interaction with the existing systems/third party components. Once this was done, we analyzed the existing systems/components and studied the APIs that were available to integrate with. We then built an API framework that integrated with third-party components feeding and consuming the required parameters. This API framework was then invoked by a custom core state machine that we built considering all the scenarios. The custom core state machine was then made to interact with the web front end and the mobile apps via APIs.
To make the platform perform at its best, we optimized Drupal's tokenization and API frameworks. The platform was built in a headless manner with the front end being on Angular. We implemented the Redis module to make caching more effective.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 8.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
BigPipe – The BigPipe module in core was implemented for faster delivery of content for improved performance.
Contact – Contact forms module was implemented to enable customers to use both personal and site-wide contact forms.
Simple OAuth – We used this module for a flexible and more secure implementation of the OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework Bearer token usage.
Chaos Tools – With the Chaos Tools module, we were able to utilize a variety of tools and APIs that came with the suite.
Drupal Commerce – We leveraged Drupal commerce and its suite of modules (Commerce Cart, Commerce Checkout, Commerce Log, etc.) for BBQ Nation as it offered complete flexibility for us to build and customize various eCommerce features for them.
State Machine – The State Machine module enabled us to code and customize workflow for various entities.
Paragraphs – The Paragraphs module was implemented so we could hand over complete control to BBQ Nation content editors for simple, clean and more powerful content creation.
Redis – Since we leveraged Redis for faster caching, the Redis module provides a module placeholder for using as dependency.
Social API – For all social media feature implementations, we leveraged the Social API module as a common interface for communicating with all social network services.
CDN – BBQ Nation is a media-rich website with tons of high-quality images, CSS and JS files. For faster delivery of this rich content, we implemented the CDN module to map the URL to a CDN.
JSON:API – BBQ Nation website / app consumes and requests many APIs, which is why we needed a more structured and efficient API scheme like JSON:API
RESTful Web Services – Webservices are made available to the website using the RESTful web services module
Organizations involved:
Sectors:
Travel and Hospitality
