Completed Drupal site or project URL: https://store.ruka.fi/fi/hiihtokeskus/kausikortti

The Kuusamo-based Ruka is one of Finland’s most popular ski resorts, which has garnered also international recognition for its high-quality training and competition facilities as well as for its available activities.

The diversity of the services on offer naturally benefit travelers visiting the area, but it also creates significant challenges to the updatability of the center’s website as well as the functionality of its online shop. The main problems were bad user experience, the lack of proper mobile support, missing integrations that caused loads of manual labor, and that even the smallest changes to the store required software development.

The online store was an outdated custom application. Drupal was previously familiar to Ruka, as the company’s website was built with Drupal 7 and they had experimented with Drupal 8.

Druid was chosen as a partner for building a new online store. The customer and the team chose to use a modern, headless approach to achieve the best possible user experience. The frontend of the online store was built with React whereas Drupal 8 and Commerce 2 were used for content management, integrating the online store to Point of Sale systems and Skidata Access Management software.

In addition, one of the project’s additional goals was to slowly migrate the content from the outdated Drupal 7 website to the new service.

The revamp for Ruka’s webshop began in March 2017, and the first revisions were published the following fall. In addition to technical revisions and interface integrations, the visual look of the website was also updated during the project. The whole project was carried out using the principles of the Scrum work management framework, and the composition of the team changed fluidly according to the project’s needs.