12 03/2010 Colour Crew

Heralding Propeller’s first foray into Expression Engine development, Colour Crew is a big leap forward in website functionality compared to our standard Textpattern CMS.

Oft described as Textpattern’s Big Brother, the Expression Engine CMS is a commercial, license based system developed by Ellis Labs providing sophisticated out of the box functionality plus an extensive set of modules and add-ons allowing for the addition of forums, e-commerce, galleries and managing multiple websites from one installation.

Colour Crew are Brisbane-based suppliers to the promotional products industry specialising in pad printing producing promotional products and packaging for brand names such as Issada, NRMA and Budget Direct.

Expression Engine was selected for Colour Crew over Textpattern due mainly to its sophisticated member management capabilities. As Colour Crew are trade-only suppliers, a dedicated members area was included to allow agents and distributors (once registered) to upload their materials to Colour Crew for production and also to access trade price lists and other resources. Members can also edit and update their profiles.

Solspace’s superb Freeform module was integrated to provide a more sophisticated enquiry system but also to include polls and questionnaires without the need for external third-party applications.

Design wise, Colour Crew wanted to go with a ‘cheeky retro feel’ that would fit in with their current branding and make customers feel welcome. To this end, we gave the site an old school feel with vintage paper backgrounds and used Colour Crews’ mascot, Pad Print Sam to highlight certain elements.