First quarter 2025: new collaborations, Drupal launches, and sharing expertise

The consortium for a European Research Infrastructure (ERIC), which aims to facilitate the creation and operation of research infrastructures of European interest, entrusted us with the design and development of a knowledge sharing and reporting platform. 

This platform aims to centralize, streamline, and present key information about European Research Infrastructure Consortia (ERIC) in order to improve collaboration, visibility, and reporting capabilities, particularly in the context of forums (https://www.eric-forum.eu/).

This ambitious project, powered by Drupal and featuring a complex data harvesting module, began in March and is scheduled for completion in June. It brings together international teams and will be led from Helsinki.

Two new sites join Elior Group's Drupal site factory

Since 2021, we have been responsible for the ongoing maintenance of the catering leader’s Aegir site factory. This quarter, two new platforms have joined their Aegir/Drupal site factory:

• The showcase site for the Entremets de Paris brand.
• The group’s intranet.

La Méridionale / CMA CGM Group

Since 2020, the shipping company La Méridionale has gradually entrusted us with the creation and maintenance of several business applications using Drupal and Symfony: 

• Freight management extranet.
• Passenger check-in application.
• Mobile application for real-time boarding tracking.
• Maintenance of the lameridionale.fr corporate website.

In this first quarter of 2025, and in line with this collaboration, we have worked on improving their passenger check-in application. Additionally, we are now providing support to the group’s Lebanese Digital Hub at CMA CGM. We share with the group close ties to Lebanon and part of our teams are based there.

Among the key projects of this first quarter, our R&D team achieved a major milestone with the release of the alpha version of our admin console for a Drupal site factory. This initiative follows on from the needs expressed by many stakeholders after the discontinuation of the Aegir project, which was historically used for multisite management under Drupal. To address this gap, we have developed an in-house solution that is more modern, more flexible, and adapted to current uses.

Our site factory in particular enables you to: 

• Easily deploy new sites through an interface and a few form fields.
• Manage your sites simply from a centralized dashboard.
• Integrate multiple installation profiles to cover a wide range of needs.
• Create and manage your backups.

Designed for organizations with a strong need for consistency, productivity, and governance, this solution is the result of our ongoing investments in R&D and our commitment to providing concrete, robust tools tailored to real-world needs. The open source code, developed in collaboration with our partner Evolix, is scheduled for release in May on our Github repository.

This quarter, we spoke out on three key topics for Drupal project leaders: security, open source, and eco-design—core issues at the heart of our commitment. Find them on our blog!

01. Security: How can you effectively protect your Drupal solution?

In this article, we revisit the importance of implementing a comprehensive security approach for your Drupal projects, whether during development, maintenance, or hosting. It’s also an opportunity for us to announce our partnership with Potech, a cybersecurity expert, to strengthen our production chain and offer our clients a more proactive approach.

In particular, we cover:

• The main security threats facing your Drupal solutions (SQL injection, Cross-Site Scripting, brute force attacks, denial of service, etc.).
• Drupal’s strengths when it comes to security and the dedicated modules available.
• The concept of Security by Design—ensuring security throughout the entire production and deployment chain.
• The importance of regular updates of the core and contributed modules.
• Proactive protection and monitoring actions with Darkivore and penetration testing.

02. Drupal Core, Drupal CMS, Artificial Intelligence: What’s ahead for our digital projects?

Drupal is evolving with the arrival of its version 11 and Drupal CMS, a no code-oriented branch that simplifies website creation without development.

Historically renowned for its power and flexibility, Drupal has the advantage of not imposing any predefined structure. It offers total freedom, but at the cost of complexity, which can be daunting. Long reserved for experts, it remains nonetheless an excellent foundation for building your own CMS.

As for us, we have leveraged this flexibility by creating our own Drupal Starter—namely, a ready-to-use site base, preconfigured to integrate GDPR, SEO, media, reusable blocks, user roles, modern design, and Layout Builder for genuine no-code site building.

In our article, we take a closer look at the evolution of Drupal with version 11, the arrival of Drupal CMS, and their relevance for your digital projects. We also discuss the AI modules bundled with Drupal CMS, which are also available for Drupal Core.

03. Eco-design & Drupal: Eco-Index or RGESN, which approach should you take?

Eco-design is becoming an increasingly central issue in RFPs and digital transformation initiatives. But how can you realistically balance business needs, sustainability, and the other constraints inherent to a digital project (SEO, GDPR, accessibility, user experience, etc.)? In our article, we share our perspective as a digital services company:

• Presentation of two main approaches: Eco-Index (environmental performance indicator) and RGESN (General Reference Framework for the Eco-Design of Digital Services).
• Detailed comparison of both methods: their objectives, strengths, limitations, and use cases.
• Case studies on eco-designed Drupal projects, and how we have integrated these frameworks into our process (from design to hosting).
• Advice on choosing the most suitable approach depending on your project type.

What may interest you:

• Feedback on the redesign of the Manioc portal: a Drupal library for the Caribbean, Amazon, and Guiana Shield 
• Overview of open source and challenges of digital sovereignty.

We have updated the Page Cache Exclusion module, covered by the security committee. It is now compatible with Drupal 11. This module is a convenient way to exclude certain pages of a site from the cache when necessary. The configuration allows you to list your pages by query parameters, status codes, or their URLs... Convenient!
https://www.drupal.org/project/page_cache_exclusion 

This first quarter of 2025 ultimately reflects our commitments quite well: supporting our clients over the long term, delivering complex projects, and sharing our expertise on key digital issues.

Whether you're starting from scratch or looking to improve an existing project, our team supports you every step of the way, from design to deployment. Contact us to discuss it!