After a short hiatus from the previous site, CannonWines.com has returned. I wasn’t a fan of how the old site was used, so I started from scratch. Previously, the site had to be updated manually by editing javascript to change the menu system, which only allowed you to browse the portfolio by loading huge PDFs through text links. There wasn’t anybody on staff to do that before I got there, nor would there be if I were on vacation or got hit by a truck (knock on wood), so the site needed a method for previewing all wines in the portfolio that could be updated on the fly by anyone. Sounds like a need for a Content Management System (CMS).

So I designed a new front-end UI that shows a brief, the bottle, the data, the accolades, the tasting notes and download links for resources on every wine, including tech sheets, shelf-talkers, brochures, hi-res bottle shots and hi-res labels:

Then I asked a few buddies to build a custom CMS to manage it all. They built it over a few weekends in CakePHP, which makes updating the site as easy as logging in and filling out a short form. All of the portfolio info is stored in the site’s MySQL database, from which we can pull data for almost anything. More on that after the jump. Read more »