About the Project
This project is now online for some months and I'm happy to finally have the time and the customers approval to write about it.
As some of you might know germany has one of the best health care systems in the world. If you live here you're enforced by the law to have a health insurance: As an employee you take care of choosing your "Krankenkasse" (health insurance provider) and your employer pays your dues to them like taxes. If you're selfemployed or earn more than "the average worker" you can also choose/have to get a private health insurance which (in many cases) covers more services (most people here for example know the "Chefarztbehandlung" which means if you ever need to get to the hospital your insurance guarantees that you will be treated by the head head physician).
People who are are civil servants get something called "Beihilfe" from the state which partially covers your medical treatments costs depending on where you live / are employed at (the federal state), if you're married, have childs and a bunch of other factors. For the remaining rest you have to get a "Restkostenversicherung" which covers the remaining rest of your expenses for treatments.
The problem with the "Beihilfe" system is: It's REALLY complex and you have to read a lot (or get help) to understand it's rules.
That's why our customer, the Continentale Krankenversicherung a.G., one of germanys largest insurance companys, asked us and our friends from Aufgesang (a specialist agency for Online Public Relations, Content Marketing and SEO) to build a portal that informs potential customers and give them the posibility to get in touch with local experts. As a plus people who are interested in an insurance can calculate their costs without having to read through all official laws and brochures.
There currently are three editors (all professional journalists) that constantly update content and write new texts to cover more in depth topics. Furthermore there are plenty of features that are planned to be released in the next years so the portal as a whole will continue growing and keep getting more usefull and hopefully get the #1 source of information for "Beihilfe" and "Restkostenversicherung" in Germany.
<3 Processwire
From a technical point of view there were many custom tailored things we've implemented in processwire. The Search uses a modified Version of Jonathan Darts excellent Elasticsearch Module (with a fallback to a basic text search in pw). We've created a lot of services and Tools to import Excel lists of experts and their coverage areas, complex rulesets for the costs calculation, a frontend calculation tool (built on top of Knockout.js), several HannaCodes to insert Download-Buttons and information within the content and last but not least a custom pdf-guide which is completely based on the users input and generated on the fly from the "Beihilfe-Rechner" (calculation tool). There also are mechanisms to inform experts when someone wishes to contact them, a newsletter service and many, many other things.
Currently there are about 30 installed modules, 42 "Physical" template files (53 Templates all in all) ... and growing.
I'm (still) really happy we were allowed to choose processwire for this project as we NEVER had any task we couldn't manage within the blink of an eye. If I think about having to build all those import tools in (i.e.) Typo3 I'm pretty sure we would have needed double the time. So once again: Thanks ryan and all contributors for building such an awesome piece of software.
P.S.: We're currently searching for senior php developers to continue developing this and more portals and websites. If you're interested: Feel free to contact me!
P.P.S: There are three more sites to come in the next weeks. I'll present them here as always