Daltons has been a family business for more than 70 years, producing and supplying potting mixes, composts, shingle, sand and landscape products.
Their customers fall into three very different groups: home gardeners buying bagged product from Bunnings, The Warehouse, Mitre 10 and independent garden centres; commercial growers, nurseries and horticulturalists buying pallet loads directly; and landscape yards providing bulk supplies. Each group needs different information, different pricing, different tools, and a different feel from the site.
BlueFusion was engaged to build them a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) capable of serving all three audiences from a single Drupal install and single codebase. Designs came from Naomi Young at Limelight Creative, who was acting as Daltons' graphic designer and project manager. The brief covered integration with the company's ERP system, differentiated access for editors, marketers and visitors, and - importantly - the ability to re-theme content units, pages and whole site areas for different user groups without duplicating content.
On the retail side, visitors land in a bright, gardener-friendly space: the products catalogue is browsable by need, the Gardening Guides give practical how-to content for home growers, there's a stockist locator for finding retail bagged product nearby, and content-marketing features like the Sunflowers in Kindies community outreach programme and regular customer competitions keep the audience engaged. The gardening content and social competitions are managed in-house, working directly in the Drupal CMS.
The commercial site area renders with its own distinct theme aimed at professional buyers: a different visual language, its own content structure, direct online ordering for selected customer segments, detailed stockist lists, individual brand sections for separate product lines, and product data kept in sync with the company ERP. Products are pushed from the ERP to Drupal overnight, with an on-demand sync available when editors or sales need fresher data.
Behind both audience areas sits one editorial team and one admin experience. Editors use Drupal's Layout Builder drag-and-drop tools to manage pages where flexibility matters, while other areas (product detail pages, commercial catalogues) are locked to tightly controlled layouts for consistency and ease of re-theming. Design patterns and templates were deliberately abstracted from the outset so that re-theming a section - or the whole site - doesn't mean rebuilding it.
That decision paid off quickly. The site launched on Drupal 8 with Drupal Commerce at a point when Commerce was still in beta; Commerce hit its first release candidate shortly after launch, and the second iteration of the site was ready with direct ordering for selected customer segments almost immediately. Since then the site has been upgraded forward through Drupal's major versions with no content rebuild, and re-themed to match the work of Daltons' later graphic designer, Kylie at Creative Current - again, without touching the underlying content structure. The same content has now carried two distinct visual identities with the third on the horizon as the business refreshes it's colours and styling.
Integration with Mailchimp and the social-competition flows round out the marketing stack, and BlueFusion continues to provide ongoing Drupal support, platform updates and custom development.
"BlueFusion have been responsive and helpful at every corner. We have really appreciated how they worked around our timing requirements. They have invested care and attention to our project to make it the best it can be both for now and in preparation for future needs, with many suggestions and advice along the way. I will be recommending their business to others looking for a quality open source CMS website build."
- Naomi Young, Limelight Creative (Daltons' designer and project manager)
Under the hood
- Drupal - launched on Drupal 8, kept current with major-version upgrades since
- Drupal Commerce for retail, commercial and landscape ordering flows
- Custom Exo ERP integration with scheduled overnight sync and on-demand refresh for product data
- TailwindCSS and AlpineJS front-end - originaly built with Bootstrap & jQuery
- Layout Builder for editorial flexibility where it's wanted, controlled layouts where it isn't
- User groups and access control for editors, marketers and commercial customers
- Abstracted design patterns and templates enabling clean re-theming without content rebuild
- Mailchimp integration, on-site competitions, social media integration
- Two audience areas - retail and commercial - served from one site and one codebase
