There are good CMS's out there, and many are fine tools to make blogs, websites for small business and even for a medium-sized one; but can they handle a large website, with a lot of data interaction that comes from external sources? What comes up if you need to build an intranet as well? Scrivito rose to the challenge and was able to handle every request and then some.

Short story: the Airport of Nuremberg was in need of a massive redesign for its website and they needed it in just two months. As one can guess, developing an airport’s website is not child’s play: you need to provide the user a flight board that retrieves data in real-time and in the most reliable way, users expect to be able to book flights (and possibly cars, hotels and more), multilingual is a must and of course, security is a major issue. It’s quite a challenging task and if you start developing with the wrong tools, you will soon find yourself painted into a corner, but the development team at Infopark was quite confident to have the right ones at their disposal since Scrivito is pretty different from the standard PHP-based CMS. The Scrivito CMS has been built for Ruby on Rails web applications, with two claims firmly embedded in its foundations: power and flexibility. With the aid of a Ruby programmer, you can do almost anything, and Scrivito really stands up when it comes to data-mapping and an extensive use of dynamic content.

With powerful and flexible API integrations and thanks to Rails Stack technology, building up multi-source widgets that get data from multiple sources is perfectly possible with Scrivito. Widgets can be reused anywhere on the website, sharing and processing the same data, therefore giving the website user a more comfortable and reassuring experience. 

The booking widget is probably the most visible feature of the Nuremberg Airport website; it connects to the airport’s airlines database and retrieves the data for displaying it in different contexts. But with the table widget is possible to achieve even more, gathering the data from all of them and merging then all together into a dynamic a table. Thanks to this flexible table widget, it is possible to combine features to create new interactive functionality. Users can select a destination, check the routes to that destination, book a flight, search for a hotel, check how to get to the hotel, rent a car, book a parking space etc., etc., etc. One great advantage of Scrivito widgets is that they can be easily reused across the website and are highly customizable, giving the client a high degree of control over the website.

Some clients have special requirements and the Airport of Nuremberg was no exception. They needed to be able to manage emergency situations, and events such as these have to be carefully considered in a sensitive environment like a passengers airport. The Infopark team built for that purpose a Security Center; a control panel where the airport’s operators can enable/disable features and handle emergencies situations.

Of course an airport’s website requires more than just one language: no problem at all since Scrivito has built-in multi-language support that allows editors to manage several different language versions of a website, sharing the same data.

There is also a multisite feature built in Scrivito that has been used to build and manage an intranet as well; to ensure the high security level required by intranets, all information is shared with the website through web services, keeping the two platforms separate, while allowing the editors to write content just once.

Choosing the right tools to build up a large and complex website does not only mean that CTO's and developers should consider the features available, but also check to see if they are easy to use. If you have powerful features at your disposal, but they are accompanied by a steep learning curve that requires editors to be intensely trained before using them … well, your costs may increase beyond expectations. Building up the Nuremberg Airport website and intranet was not an easy task and the deadlines were strict as well; but thanks to Scrivito’s easy-to-use interface and its high level of flexibility, the Infopark team has another satisfied client on its record.