The Shopping Center, Online as on Site

FUF implemented messepark.at on Drupal 11, in German and English. Today the website runs on Drupal 11.3 with PHP 8.4. From the first commit on October 31, 2025 to the launch on April 21, 2026, just under six months passed.

The editors build every page from 22 building blocks: hero slider, image galleries, teasers for shops, events, news, jobs and magazine, forms and the site plan. Contact, voucher reservation and newsletter signup are such forms, and the signup goes to the CleverReach interface through a module of FUF's own, with double opt-in. Content goes through draft, published and archived. Since the launch, the team has saved 1,070 versions of content, six a day on average.

Every shop is a content item of its own with category, floor, location in the building, images, contact and link. The overview filters by twelve categories and three floors, both combinable, and the links in the menu open it with a category preselected. Drupal builds the address of each shop itself from category and name, with a pattern of its own per language.

FUF took over the content of the old website by import: 65 shops, 21 pages and a job ad, with texts, images, floor, location and contact details. Since the launch, 95 redirects lead from the old addresses to the new ones, and Drupal logs which old addresses are still being requested.

The website draws the site plan from three vector plans in SVG format, one per floor, with 60 retail units in total. Every unit carries a number, and the same number is stored with the shop: that is how the plan finds the shop. 57 units are linked this way, vacant units stay gray.

Moving the mouse over a unit runs a light veil across it in 1.5 seconds, then the shop's card appears with image, floor and short text. A click selects it right away. The renovation is in the plan too: the construction phase is drawn in.

Every shop page shows the plan again, in the color of Messepark: the shop's floor, its unit highlighted in orange, a light circle around it and a line to the name. The detail comes from the same plans and the same number, there is no separate image per shop.

When a shop moves, the editors change one number, and the site plan and the shop page match again.

The team maintains opening hours in the backend as rules, not as text: for Messepark and seven other areas such as INTERSPAR, the pharmacy and the post office partner, 40 rules today. A rule applies to weekdays such as “MO-DO”, a day such as “SA”, a date such as “26.10.” or a period such as “10.10.-20.10.”. If several rules apply to one day, the last one entered wins, so a public holiday beats the weekly hours.

The same rules feed four places on the website: the line at the top of every page with today's opening hours and the changes over the next nine days, the hours in the footer, the table of all areas and the list of the 13 public holidays. In English, the website switches to the 12-hour format, for example “Open today from 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM”. Since October 2026, the holiday list also shows special days with their own hours and a note.

The media library holds 469 images, plus documents and videos. Drupal scales every image to the widths the page needs, from 105 to 2,520 pixels, and delivers it as AVIF or WebP, in 50 image styles. The page loads images outside the screen only when they are needed.

Measured on October 20, 2026 with an empty browser cache: on desktop, the home page transfers 307 KB in 21 requests, and the page itself arrives after about 0.1 seconds.

FUF runs messepark.at on its own servers and supports the website in ongoing operation. New features first run in a password-protected test environment, where the Messepark team sees them before they go live.

That is how the holiday list with special days arrived in October 2026. A shop search that filters as you type, an overview of all shops with their logos and a new overview of the job ads are currently running in the test environment.