"Our new series, 'Joomla! for Large Projects,' highlights Joomla as a robust and professional CMS. It is not only a great choice for small businesses or NGOs homepages but also suitable for large-scale commercial ventures. In this first edition, we feature Djumla’s work on a project for the logistics giant, GLS Germany. We thank David Jardin, Managing Director of Djumla, for sharing insights about the project, answering our five key questions."

Question 1: 
Can you provide a general overview of the project, including its main goals, key metrics, and the approach to achieving them?

The main aim of the project was to create an independent web platform for the GLS Germany team, on which they can operate flexibly and quickly. In addition to the actual content pages with informative and advertising content, it was also necessary to implement the relevant functions (parcel tracking, rerouting, support forms, FAQs, etc.) as the respective functions on the global corporate site weren't supposed to be used to avoid inconsistent user experiences while switching sites.

The project therefore began with comprehensive content and, above all, technical coordination: which functional requirements need to be implemented, which company APIs need to be connected to and who is the relevant contact person. In this context, it was also necessary to build up comprehensive knowledge of the internal processes, because coding without understand the actual process behind your code is a bad idea.

Last but not least, the project had to be prepared for the extremely large number of requests that the website would receive:

This was the case right from the start: Scalability and performance are not implementation details, but design decisions. With every line of code, with every potential Joomla extension, with every new function, the implications for the future site had to be taken into account.

Question 2: 
What were the biggest challenges encountered during the project, and how did you overcome them?

At the beginning, it looked as if the technical challenges would outweigh the technical challenges: the number of requests was many times greater than for any of our other projects, and the expected server load was almost terrifying.

However, we quickly realized that with Joomla we had chosen a very stable basis which - if implemented correctly - could cope with the load without any problems.

So, as in almost every project, it was more the human challenges: in a corporate environment, there are a large number of stakeholders with different interests and it is important to bring the project to a successful conclusion in such a diverse environment.

Question 3:
Which features of Joomla made it the CMS of choice for this project, and how did they contribute to the project's success?

In our project, the way in which Joomla handles multilingualism was a great advantage: we were able to set up the different language variants with different content, so we did not have to provide the entire range of functions and content in each language variant.

It also turned out that the caching in the core works extremely efficiently, making the system suitable for high-load scenarios.

Question 4:
What are the key reasons why you would recommend Joomla for large-scale projects?

That's easy to answer: because Joomla has everything this type of project needs!

Firstly, there are functions that are typically relevant for larger projects, in particular:

* Multilingualism

* Complex access rights

* Content approval workflows

Secondly, most larger projects require very specific requirements to be solved by custom development of code. With its extension system, modern framework and massive leaps in quality in versions 4.x and 5.x, Joomla provides the perfect basis for meeting these requirements efficiently and economically.

Last but not least: the efforts to make Joomla accessible by default are a huge advantage in this project size: it is very attractive for stakeholders to know that the platform is already WCAG-compliant and the additional effort required for an accessible site is therefore very manageable.

Question 5: 
What are the key factors that enable a small agency to successfully bid for / manage large-scale projects and work with big companies?

I believe there are two core competencies that a smaller agency needs to have in order to successfully handle such projects:

1. you need a great deal of expertise, especially in the technical area. In my experience, the larger the project, the greater the technological challenges become - and sound coding skills are required for custom programming at the latest. Or to put it another way: it's not enough for you to master the CMS. The skills that are typically relevant in an integrator context (knowing the backend, being able to adapt ready-made extensions) are not enough in such projects.

2. you need self-confidence: corporate structures and large projects can be intimidating - but don't forget: as a rule, you have significantly more expertise than your counterpart, so don't belittle yourself. On the contrary: a smaller, flexible agency with short lines of communication can be a great advantage, especially for corporations, because it compensates for the inertia that exists in such organizations.