Blenderdeval
The first generation of the site for Blender, a Spanish maker of vending machine products. Plain PHP on a CMS of my own, with a catalogue and ordering written from scratch.
Blender Deval did not run vending machines: they made what goes inside them. Soluble coffee, chocolate and hot drinks, produced and sold to the companies that stock the machines in offices, gyms and waiting rooms.
How it started
In 2009 they got in touch looking for a website, because until then they had none at all. Everything went through the phone: a customer who wanted to know what Blender sold had to call and ask, and a customer who wanted to order had to call again.
What they needed was straightforward to say and less straightforward to build. They wanted their range on the web, laid out so anyone could see what was available without picking up the phone. And they wanted customers able to order from it, so the site had to do something rather than just sit there looking like a brochure.
That is the site this page is about, and the first of the three it turned into over the following five years.
A CMS of my own
The site did not run on Drupal, WordPress or anything else off the shelf. It ran on a CMS I wrote myself, in plain PHP, on the PHP 5.2 that shared hosting ran at the time: no namespaces, no closures, none of what arrived with 5.3 later that year.
The admin covered what the company actually needed to run the site without calling me:
- Articles and news, written and published from the back office
- The texts of the site, editable in place rather than hardcoded in the templates
- The product catalogue, with products added and removed as the range changed
- A contact form
And it went past a brochure site: customers could place orders from the catalogue.
All of it was built from scratch. There was no framework underneath, no package to install for any of it, and every piece, from the session handling to the admin forms to the order flow, was written by hand.
That was a reasonable answer in 2009 for a site this size, and it meant the client got exactly the fields they needed and nothing else to get lost in.
Next generation
This version ran for two years. In 2011 the site was thrown away and built again from scratch: the custom CMS was left behind, and the front end was rebuilt with Flash for the animations and Ajax for the parts that had to load without leaving the page.