Enter Grasshopper CMS
A Robust, Customizable Framework
In numerous cultures around the world, the grasshopper is revered as a symbol of abundance, creativity, and leaping forward. It is apt, then, that Solid Digital chose to name its CMS framework “Grasshopper,” which for many firms has become synonymous with “competitive advantage.”
When we launched Solid Digital, we quickly built a reputation for creating innovative websites using a relatively new open-source CMS, Wordpress.
And over the ensuing years the framework has served us well, enabling us to provide our clients with dynamic, responsive, visually engaging websites with the flexibility our clients need to control their own content and upgrades.
Yet, as organizations grow and delve into larger, more complex projects in the e-commerce space, we’ve found Wordpress falls woefully short of the robust, customizable framework needed for porting large volumes of data, handling huge amounts of traffic, and providing seamless user experiences.
Sure, Wordpress has a host of plug-ins — but when it comes to a website featuring hundreds of thousands of SKUs with complex relationships to ever-changing data (such as pricing, inventory, and new product features), we need a framework that allows us to do truly custom work that doesn’t require us to hack apart unreliable 3rd party plug-ins and isn’t impeded by Wordpress’ limitations.
Enter Grasshopper
There are numerous reasons we love Solid Interactive’s open source CMS framework:
- Grasshopper is more sensible. With its WYSIWYG admin console, we don’t have to write any code, or tweak or rebuild any plug-ins, to do truly custom work for our clients. Grasshopper allows us to do more custom design and integrations which empowers us to make whatever we want, which is great for a custom shop like ours.
- Grasshopper is an efficient, robust, open source data management tool. Porting massive amounts of data is effortless with Grasshopper’s API, which “speaks” to whatever program the client is using. And Grasshopper can handle more complex data relationships and a larger volume of data without any damper to server performance. Wordpress is simply not as configurable.
- Non-technical users can upload lots of content — say, a huge spreadsheet of price changes on 100,000 SKUs — and those updates will be made instantly across the website. That’s how cool and fast this tool is.
- We’ve won bigger jobs with Grasshopper, allowing us to stand out from all the other firms for whom Wordpress is the de facto CMS.
As organizations grow and delve into larger, more complex projects in the e-commerce space, we’ve found Wordpress falls woefully short of the robust, customizable framework needed for porting large volumes of data, handling huge amounts of traffic, and providing seamless user experiences.
Don’t get me wrong — Wordpress is still a great framework for smaller websites that feature “brochureware” content and lighter traffic, and we’ll continue to keep it in our arsenal. For many of our clients, Wordpress makes sense. But when it comes to projects that entail handling a larger volume of data, Wordpress falls short of what Grasshopper can do. And in a business where our number one priority is to build awesome websites and wow our clients, Grasshopper has proven to be a great differentiator.
About the Author
Naveed Usman is CRO + Partner at Solid Digital, recognized as one of Chicago’s top web design firms that has helped hundreds of businesses and organizations build their online presence, visibility, and reach by creating elegant, accessible websites that meet each client’s unique needs and goals.
