Afriso

The international AFRISO group operates in over 60 countries worldwide, employing more than 1100 workers (over half of whom operate in Germany). They provide high-quality measuring, monitoring and control solutions in heating, ventilation and cooling installations for domestic, industrial and environmental applications.

Problem

Afriso's application is a Content Management System which not only allows for publishing news but also contains a huge catalogue of the company's products to which data is automatically downloaded from an external source. The website contains user manuals, technical data and certificates for each of the products available in the database. It also allows you to expand an extensive information section on the use of the company's products such as films, tips and product usage. This whole ecosystem needed updating and modernization, improvements and some new features.

Solution

In order to identify all elements of the application that needed to be improved or updated, the developers' work was preceded by a comprehensive audit. On its basis, we determined what actions should be taken. We have updated PHP to version 7.3 and also upgraded Laravel framework to version 6.0 LTS with support until 2022/10. We also introduced automatic deployment of the application using GithubActions. We created a database migration mechanism from scratch and also solved several security problems. We have added a new feature that automatically reduces images when adding them to the page, which saves space on the server and makes loading data more efficient. We have also rebuilt the existing search engine using ElasticSearch. This tool makes the search results more relevant than in the previous version of the app. There were also some novelties in the visual layer of the Afriso platform. We have changed the design of some subpages, such as: search results, product card. We have complied with all Responsive Web Design standards in both the desktop and mobile versions.