In the fall of 2015, Restel decided to improve its web presence. The company, Finland’s largest hospitality organization, runs a large portfolio of hotels and restaurants, including internationally-known brands such as Burger King and Holiday Inn. The primary requirements were to centralize most of Restel’s online presence to restel.fi, while at the same time redesigning it from a corporate site to a user-friendly outward-facing portal.

The project was started on Drupal 8, less than two months after it had been released. This presented us with exciting and useful new features, changes in the way we build sites because of tools like Twig, Composer, and CMI, and the occasional challenging core bug hunt.

This is a showcase covering the six-month process of building a new site that communicates with several other systems, some maintained by us, and some by third parties.

We’ll explain how sickness impacted the schedule, and how using an agile approach helped us take this hit. The Product Owner will share her experience of growing into a new role, and how Scrum smoothly facilitated the evolving requirements.

We’re looking forward to sharing our experience with those interested in taking a look in our kitchen to see what’s involved when working on more complex projects.