Tailr is a Belgian company that builds custom web and mobile applications, and they’re a Sulu Silver Partner. Tailr provides development services including analysis, functional and technical design, and implementation of digital solutions. They were approached by Zangersheide, an internationally known studbook that breeds and sells warmblood horses for showjumping. Zangersheide wanted a more centralized website with improved UX and customized capabilities.
The problem: An inconsistent UX experience for both users and admins
Zangersheide’s UX challenges affected users as well as the Zangersheide team. Services and offerings were spread across five different websites, each with their own admins, who had their own priorities and processes. For example, every form on the website worked differently because the teams responsible for events, auctions, and the registry wanted different information, each in a particular order. The website also had no search functionality, so if users did not know where they wanted to navigate, they could get lost, frustrated, and waste time trying to find the right page.
As Nathalie De Martin, Tailr’s pre-sales and customer support, summarizes, “The old Zangersheide website was a mix of different websites with all their own logic and functionality. The user experience was poor, and this was something that we wanted to solve. On top of that, there were a lot of subdomains, which all had their own admin, making it difficult to manage from the client side as well.”
Finding the best fit: Deliberating, then choosing Sulu
Before the Zangersheide project, the Tailr team were fans of Sulu and has worked with the CMS for other projects. Stef Liekens, the Zangersheide project’s technical lead, says, “At the beginning of 2018, we started our first Sulu (1.6) project for our customer VAR. I helped set up the VAR project, and I did other fully Sulu CMS-based projects afterward.”
When the Zangersheide project rolled around, Tailr wanted to choose their CMS carefully. Sulu was a top choice because of successful past experiences, but the Tailr team wanted to do their due diligence. “For the Zangersheide project, we compared Sulu with Drupal, Contentful, and Laravel,” says Stef. “Because we knew that the Zangersheide project needed a lot of customizations (such as the auction feature) and we already had a lot of experience with the Symfony framework, we decided to choose Sulu CMS. With Sulu CMS you can easily integrate features that are entirely separated from the CMS and built with handy Symfony components.”
Zangersheide had specific business logic that required customization
Zangersheide had very specific business logic, which would not have been a good fit for a predefined frontend stack; they needed something more custom. Tailr began by providing general reusable logic, but still with specific business rules. For example, the site contains general logic such as news articles, job vacancies, and more. But the site also contains business logic particular to Zangersheide, such as horses subdivided into stallions, auction horses, auctions that need to be organized, and submissions that need to be converted, such as a foal registered in the past that now needs to be registered as a horse. Nathalie, as a former Zangersheide team member, proved very helpful in navigating what she calls the “horse logic” of this project. “The horse industry has some specific rules that were new to the team,” she says.
Tailor leveraged Sulu CMS’s features and the team’s expertise
Tailr chose Sulu with deliberation, and they used many of the CMS’s features, functionalities, and capabilities to their fullest extent to meet Zangersheide’s needs and requirements. Six points really stood out to the Tailr team.
- Sulu’s flexibility and customization was a critical factor in the success of the Zangersheide project. Stef elaborates, “Because we were starting with this rock-solid Symfony-based CMS, we could put our focus more on custom features and integrations. We were able to build business-specific custom entities such as horses, stallions, and auction horses. We could really take advantage of Sulu’s extensibility for creating CRUDs (create, repeat, update and delete) to visualize and manage custom data types.” Shauni, Tailr’s product owner and analyst, adds, “Sulu really makes it easy for us to create our own custom things. This allowed us to fulfill the client's specific wishes related to the horse industry: organizing auctions, ordering semen, dynamic forms based on a chosen type, etc.”
- Tailr was able to deliver another feature Zangersheide had long wanted with the help of the Sulu CMS: live auction functionality. “Here we built a custom screen to be able to enter bidding steps ourselves, to provide 'going once, going twice' in combination with the custom entity auction horse, as an example,” says Shauni. Sulu also allows you to work with whatever frontend stack you want, another feature Tailr liked and employed. “We liked the freedom of being able to choose to work with Tailwind CSS, Stimulus JS, and some Symfony UX packages,” says Stef.
- The Tailr team made good use of Sulu’s Bundles in this project. They used the Article Bundle to easily create sections for news, events, vacancies and more, and Sulu's Activity Bundle to keep track of account and registered horse history. “We liked Sulu’s built-in features like the ActivityBundle and used this in our custom data types/entities and CRUDs,” says Stef.
- Sulu’s intuitive, central admin interface was another plus. “I personally like working in the Sulu admin a lot. It is very clear because of the sub-navigations and sub-divisions,” says Shauni. “I also find it useful to have the general overview of the navigation in the Webspaces: which page belongs under which page, which page I want in the header but not in the footer, and so on.” She adds, “We also loved the new React-based interface which gave us the freedom to create some custom views, field types, transformers, toolbar actions, and more.”
- Sulu’s built-in multilingual support proved invaluable to Zangersheide’s global reach. “Sulu’s multilingual capabilities are useful,” says Shauni. “It is very easy to create a page in English and when you switch to another language it automatically asks to take over all the content, which is very helpful when you are working with five languages, like Zangersheide is.”
- Finally, Tailr appreciated that Sulu had technical support and expertise on hand when they needed it. “We could count on the Sulu Slack when we needed and got useful answers to complex questions,” says Stef. “Also, the audit document we received from a core member of the Sulu community gave us helpful technical insights to improve the project.”
A centralized website with upgraded UX and modern, industry-specific features
Previously, Zangersheide’s “Studbook”, “Stallions”, “Events”, “Auctions”, and “Breeder Sales” sections were all different sites. “Users needed an account on each site and had to log in each time,” observes Shauni. This confused users and forced them to double or triple their efforts. The mix and match of different sites was also inconvenient for Zangersheide’s admins to manage, as each site had its own logic and functionalities. Once Tailr was through, Zangersheide was a unified, centrally managed website. “Now that the different sites are formed into one, the users only have to register once, which is much more user-friendly,” says Shauni.
This change alone led to greatly improved UX and navigation. But Tailr went further. “Now we have one large menu tree that visitors can browse which contains all of Zangersheide’s specific content and features,” says Stef. This improved navigation and UX included custom search functionality. “We used Sulu to build the custom search,” says Stef. “For example, you can search 3 fields at a time if a visitor wants to search for a horse with a specific father, mother, and color. All of this ensures that all processes are much quicker and need less time to complete for Zangersheide.”
One of the most exciting new features for Zangersheide was the ability to hold live auctions. Admins can use the live control panel, also built with Sulu, to manage these live auctions. A Zangersheide team member can place bets, reset bets, show new bids, or put new horses up for auction, all of which is then translated to be visible on the frontend. “For this part, we used React components to build a separate view tab in the Sulu administration panel,” says Stef.
Tailr’s future includes ongoing work with Zangersheide and Sulu
“What I think is very cool about this project is that there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes magic happening,” says Nathalie. “For example, with the address book we built, users only have to enter their address once. And if you change your address, it syncs to all the other systems, which isn’t just bookkeeping; it also needs to go to the Belgian government to sync all the GDPR data. The Zangersheide website is just full of cool features that depend on the unique business flows in the backend.”
The Tailr team will continue to improve Zangersheide’s general features and functionalities, especially for the online and live auctions. But they also have a new focus, called the “Z-horse” phase. This includes building integrations with other API-based systems, services, and software to reduce the amount of manual administrative tasks. “To accomplish the “Z-horse” phase, we are building more custom views in the Sulu admin interface so the Zangersheide employees can easily process website form submissions (e.g. foal/horse/auction registrations),” says Stef.
Tailr knows the power of websites, which is why they’re turning the lens on their own company website as a future endeavor. They’re rebuilding, of course, with the latest Sulu version! “Within that project, we’ll use a Hexagonal Architecture approach, which is based on the accumulated experience of our past projects, including what we learned from Zangersheide,” explains Stef.
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