OLALA CMS - brief history

First of all a notice: All images are from a few of our clients websites. Any product image or logo from any of those images have no relation with OLALA Agency.

2020 - 2021 as much as has gone so far were the most challenging years for this product.

Short history of OLALA CMS, the engine of all websites done by us since 2015:
Late 2015 I realized that running clients website on open source CMS/cart would ruin this company.

One option was to employ and pay as less as possible developers offshore (India mostly) and ask to keep changing all websites as soon as the core of open source and plugins were changed. This was the path chosen by almost all web development companies in Australia.

I choose to solve this in a hard way and I started to develop our very own shopping cart. The foundation of current system was a cart CSM, the OLALA shopping cart.
Based on new and existing clients requests I realised that I need CMSs for other kind of websites except e-commerce such as : blogs, tourism website, events websites, worksite management, appointments and so on.

That was the moment when I started building the OLALA CMS. This CMS allows us to build virtually any kind of website in hours or less, it is easy to setup and easy to customise.
All was done based on previous experience.
As well, the new system includes a templates/themes engine. It means the layout of any website is fully at our & owner fingers (absolutely no knowledge of coding is required). There are a few predefined templates. More are added as soon as it is necessary (a client on demand request or just because).

Customisation of any website is based on switches. At this moment there are more than 700. All of them help us to give to any website different layouts and different functionalities in minutes. For example if someone has a small shop and he decides that he wish to have tourism agency as well, it can happen really quick (minutes).
The owner have access to a very limited number of switches based on his abilities, desire to customise more and of course level of subscription. For a normal business owner 20 to 30 are more than enough to get nice layout and do not be stressed out.
The owner can choose a "social media" like system. It means he upload logo, set company name, bank details, contact details and go...

Now after ~ 4 years the system started to show its power:
It runs small shops, big shops with world wide warehouses, tourism, logistic-freight, blogs, basic CRM, tachometer translator and much more. Any module can be activated for any owner in minutes (extra payment may be required).
It support at 50k items and serves 11k active uses with absolutely no problem on a quite small instance

Current status:
Very stable for: shops, warehouses and directories (articles, authors)
Work in progress - beta version for multi-owner shops and authors able to manage multiple companies

This CMS is continuously improved and all our clients take advantage of all we do (improvements are included in subscription price).