Metropolitan Transport Authority - MTA
The Marseille Transport Authority (RTM – 3,460 employees) operates a fully integrated urban network, designed to optimize the synergy and complementarity of three modes of transport: BUS – METRO – TRAMWAY. The bluedrop.fr team created the website in 2008 using Drupal 6, then redesigned it with Drupal 8. The agency has ensured its maintenance and carried out numerous developments ever since.
Our missions
- UX design
- UI design
- Development
- Maintenance
- Accommodation
Responsive and unified
The new RTM website is now available only in a single responsive version. It is fully accessible on a mobile device in its complete version. Given the traffic, we have eliminated cookies throughout the development to enable serving content behind Varnish Cache.
Performance
The issue concerns both performance, display speed, and the absorption of traffic spikes inherent to the activity during strikes, for example (exceptional cases of traffic surges over a very short period of time). The decoupled architecture offers several advantages:
- The Drupal site only receives anonymous users. It was therefore possible to cache the entire site statically for a reasonable period using Varnish.
- Dynamic elements (favorites, subscriptions, minutes, etc.) are not served on the same domain and call the Phalcon application via asynchronous JS requests (Ajax).
Our actions
In consultation with the RTM teams, we proposed a decoupled architecture, which offers a separation between editorial management and "business" processes.
For itinerary pages, timetables, MaRTM, PV payment, and permanent pass requests, the data displayed is not extracted from the Drupal CMS and its database. Here, the website is used solely for display purposes. This connection is made through web services exposing several APIs.
Transport data management
RTM has complied with European standards in the field of transportation. It has adopted the use of standards...
- NETEX (Network Exchange - European reference format for exchanging theoretical public transport offer data);
- SIRI (Service Interface for Realtime Information - protocol for exchanging real-time information on public transport networks.)
We have linked the site to these new internal services providing information using these standards.
