PlastiCMS - E-commerce website management system.

I’m a minimalist by nature. I like things designed for a particular purpose. That’s why I tend to create custom applications rather than to modify generic ones. I used to build everything from ground up using only a few handy PHP classes. However some time ago I decided it was a huge waste of time and drawbacks of this development method outweighed the benefits.

I decided to give some of the generally available frameworks a try. After some time of playing with open-source solutions I chose CakePHP. I liked CakePHP the most because of its conventions, model relationships and the fact it worked with both PHP4 and PHP5.

PlastiCMS was my first commercial project created with CakePHP. It’s a custom-built CMS for managing a company website with an integrated E-commerce application.

Features of PlastiCMS include:

Page management. You can organise pages in a classical tree structure, which is not trendy but suitable for a company site. Navigational elements are automatically generated using the page tree.
TinyMCE rich text editor. You can edit pages the way you edit MS Word documents.
An Image Gallery with a fancy Web2.0-like presentation using JavaScript.
A Catalogue of Products with unlimited number of categories and subcategories. Products can be assigned to multiple categories. Each product can have many variants (colour, size, length). Each variant may influence price of the product.
Internationalisation. You can run several language versions of a site.
A simple Client Relationship Manager is included
It’s Google-friendly
It works with any shared hosting provider
It’s simple to use for non-technical people.

Screenshots of a live site using PlastiCMS:

The Flash Player and a browser with Javascript support are needed..

Plastiflora’s site design was created by a friend of mine, Marcin from K13 Graphic Design. I made the XHTML/CSS version of his idea.

Note: Plastiflora logo is a property of Plastiflora company. Both logos and pictures of products are used only for the purpose of presentation. Currently the site of Plastiflora is maintained by a third-party contractor so it may look different.

Filed under: PHP, My Pet Projects on 2006-10-22 by Damian Gaweda Add this page to: