Keios Solutions is a web studio located in Europe. The company is an active member of the October community, contributing code to the platform core, developing plugins and of course using October for their clients.

The company primarily works with small and medium clients in United Kingdom, Ireland, Poland, Cyprus, Romania and United States. They focus on providing very custom eCommerce websites for several industries - telecommunication, printing, gaming and tourism.

Since the beginning of the October era they have created and successfully deployed 14 websites based on October, and more websites are in development at the moment. Today we asked Jakub Zych, the project manager, to share their story with the October community and tell us why October was so successful in being adopted by the company.

Why did you choose October?

It was easy to start working with and very extensible. Our core developers got how to work with it immediately and our frontend developers loved it, as it is very easy to write very modern themes for October, style plugins and use Twig. It is also very easy for them to add client-friendly backend plugins which help our customers to manage the website.

What other platforms have you used?

We started with Wordpress, but then we checked its source code and quickly went to look for something else. We switched to Drupal and DjangoCMS and we were quite fond of them, but then a project came up that required rapid development, so we needed a CMS with an appropriate learning curve for all developers to switch easily and learn it quickly. October was the best shot.

Was it difficult to switch to October?

For core developers - not at all. For frontend developers it was a breath of fresh air, because it was a switch from database to file-based templates, so the theme became very easily manageable and deployable with git.

Do you prefer October to other platforms for new projects?

It depends on the project. We think that what's important and what matters in web development business is to use "the proper tool for the job". A few days back I have found a banking institution that was using OctoberCMS for frontend website and all its modules, but the online banking service behind it was written in Java. I think this is a nice example. October does great as a CMS, but we will use static typed languages if we find that they are better tool for the specific job.

Do you often use third-party plugins?

Yes, we do. There are some great plugins on the Marketplace. We are very fond of Blog and Editable plugin. We use Google Analytics and Translate plugins all the time. We are also using Scott Bedard's plugins like Blog Tags, Debugbar or Analytics Extension. Third party plugins are the magic of October, because after installation you get a clean CMS without any modules and you can easily turn it into, for example, a blogging platform using simple script to install plugins or by creating project on the October's website.

Do you develop October plugins for the internal use or the Marketplace?

There are some few plugins from us on the Marketplace, there are some more on GitHub, but we write a lot for internal use, right now on our GitLab there are 43 projects in the "october_plugins" group and some more packages. Besides plugins, we are trying to extend possibilities of this platform, by adding functionalities that allow Test Driven Development, extending it with libraries like Apparatus and by supporting OctoberCMS with commits and patches.

Thanks, Jakub! We are happy to see that more studios trust and use October for their clients. By the way, we found that Keios Solutions' anniversary is coming up soon, so we wish them lots of success in business!