With around 25 exhibitions a year for some major brands, Haymarket Exhibitions required a web platform that would allow them to run individual websites for each exhibition, whilst benefiting from a shared infrastructure and re-usable components. These websites are the primary marketing tools for the majority of exhibitions, so this was a critical project for Haymarket.
After initially being brought in to complete a migration project to a new web platform that went wrong, Chapter have created a platform and development roadmap based on the Drupal content management system, running in multi-site mode. The solution is a best-of-breed use of off-the-shelf, free open source products and carefully crafted integration by Chapter Media, the end result of which allows many 10s of sites to reuse both functional and design components, maintain centralised user data on a virtualised hosting environment. The next phase of this platform involved a migration to Drupal 7 and to cloud hosting, which will deliver significant cost savings and improved usability for editors.
Key benefits to Haymarket are the relatively low cost and extreme rapidity with which new sites can be launched on the platform, the unified nature with which all sites can be managed (all editors share a common set of tools and workflow), the speed of publishing that this enables and the ability of the platform to react quickly to new requirements.
Reference available on request.