Most people are aware of the wonders of WordPress, the popularity of Drupal, and the extendability of Joomla, but what happens when your wrench, hammer and screwdriver don’t do what you need them to? We love WordPress especially, don’t get us wrong, but sometimes these solutions seem a bit like driving your car to get the end of your street.

For the last 3 years we’ve been continually expanding on our own CMS nick-named “Peanut Butter”. What makes it so special is that it is completely tailored to the content it manages. It does anything and everything that you would expect from a CMS: uploads images, edits rich-text, orders content, associates tags with items, manages users, publishes previews and writes XML. But the best part is that the codebase scales itself to do only what your custom web site needs quickly.

Many would take this for granted. Your CMS shouldn’t require training. It should just make sense and as a bonus it should look like it was designed just for you. You’ve just launched your new custom web experience and you need to control it. Et voila! a matching custom control panel without breaking the piggy bank.

Most people know us for the immense pride that we put into the front facing side of our work and for the backend this is no different. DDB’s brand new site is a wonderful example and a testament to its power and scalability.

We are happy to echo the announcement last month where at Banff 2010 the NFB introduced the new site that will house a collection of innovative projects and interactive documentaries/essays that we developed aka ‘the framework’.

This framework was initially noodled over a year ago by our creative and technical team along with the NFB and when late last year the NFB approached us to develop the site to contain mini-sites we were excited to renew the creative relationship that had produced the multi-award winning Waterlife.

Not only did we have the pleasure of designing and developing the front end we participated in developing projects that would reside in it, namely “Flub and Utter”.

From the Banff2010.com site:

Interactive.NFB.ca is a site that hosts a growing "collection of projects - interactive documentaries, video and animations, photographic art and essays, data visualization, mobile and locative media, community media and user-generated media," which aims to support content that has yet to be, or may never be broadcast . Not without risks, the site is an ingenious way to facilitate conversations and collaborations for creatives in this new media landscape.