Welcome to my first in a series of posts about a project that we're all super excited about at Dynamo - the ground-up design and development of an online store for the Yellow Bird Project.
I'll be focusing my attention on the development side of the project and, notably, our decision to use the Spree E-commerce platform.
We spent a few weeks evaluating our options before settling on Spree. Here's a quick list of reasons (in no particular order) we chose Spree:
- It's open source and based on Ruby on Rails (our preferred development framework).
- It's in active development and we're looking forward adding our contribution to the betterment of the project!
- It is not an "out of the box" solution. Spree is designed to be very extensible and includes several key, production-ready data models and supports all of the major payment gateways via the popular Active Merchant plugin.
When we started our search for potential platforms for the project, we were leaning heavily towards building everything from scratch. We needed to ensure that we could give users the best-of-breed shopping experience we have planned for Yellow Bird and a template based system just wasn't going to cut it, no matter how "customizable" it claims to be.
That's the real beauty of Spree in our eyes - the fact that it isn't plug and play. We have total control and freedom when it comes to the presentation layer, a non-negotiable point for us. We truly appreciate the hard work off all the Spree contributors who have pushed the platform to where it is today. We can't wait to share many of the advancements with the community that we have planned for Yellow Bird!
Stay tuned....
Bryan Mahoney
- Bryan is Dynamo's Director of Technology, continually breaking new ground evaluating, developing and guiding our sites and webapps, & a pillar in Dynamo's client service front. Co-author of 2 early books on the integration of ColdFusion and Flash, he is an expert in database driven content management and design. Bryan now principally rides Ruby on Rails.
