Washingtons Green Grocer is the brainchild of John (Zeke) Zechiel and his wife Lisa. After identifying the need for better produce and deliverables versus store bought goods, John and Lisa planted the seeds for Washingtons Green Grocer in 1994. Every week, Washingtons Green Grocer provides customers with tentative lists of fruits and vegetables that will be available, and each customer can pick and choose what they would like delivered (yep, home delivery!) for that week through their online account.

Providing unmatched service and 100% dedication to custom satisfaction, Washingtons Green Grocer has been wildly popular and has exploded in the DC metro area. They currently serve all of Washington DC and the surrounding suburban areas in Maryland and Virginia from Severna Park to Arlington and all points in between north and south.

How does it work?

Every week, Washingtons Green Grocer selects 12 to 14 different fruits and vegetables and delivers them to your doorstep. On Friday’s, they email customers a tentative list for the next weeks delivery. If there is anything on the list you don’t want, you can log into your account and customize your box. For example, you can choose to receive only 7 items instead of the full box, or substitute items for other items. Each customer can choose exactly what they want and get it without fail every single week. You can also set custom schedules for delivery, such as every other week, or once a month, or schedule around vacation time. It’s all up to the customer!

Application

Such business growth commands the necessity of a powerful web application to tie all the logic together and keep things running smoothly. After getting tired of the shortcomings of their previous system, Zeke contacted us and we started talking about a full redesign of the front end and a re-architecting of the back end. After planning and mind-mapping the application to the last detail, Inclind began work on the project early in the summer of this year.

Their initial website was built on a rigid and inflexible Coldfusion system. The first order of business was getting all the existing data out and into the new system and giving it structure to make it easy to work with. As with all our sites, we begin with a base install of Drupal 6 to build from. Drupal is the best CMF (content management framework) available right now. Other packages that are simply CMS (content management systems- Plone, Wordpress, Joomla) are not as adaptable and flexible as Drupal.

To handle the business end of things, Ubercart takes care of the day to day transactions for customers. There are over 5,000 active customers in the system. To make it as easy as possible to get started, we ask for your basic information up front and allow you to pick your items for delivery. After your account is created, a staff member at Washington’s Green Grocer selects the most appropriate truck route for you and you will begin receiving deliverables on the next scheduled day.

At this point, a customer can login at any time and adjust their delivery schedule, items for delivery, or halt deliveries. Customers can also browse recipes on the site and submit their own. Washington’s Green Grocer promotes healthy eating habits and you will find plenty of recipes on their website for that.

Backend

Along with the new visuals and customer functionality, we needed to build and provide lots of cool administrative stuff into the backend for easy management of customers, data, and content.

We also needed to be able to actively map delivery truck routes through Google Maps on demand and be able to filter them in a variety of ways. This helps Washingtons Green Grocer visually assess their delivery routes, their customers, and orders. We also also extended on that to provide filtering tools to narrow it down further to specific routes, specific clients, specific orders or orders with specific kinds of products.

Washingtons Green Grocer staff also have a variety of reporting tools at their disposal for viewing customer trends, requests, future forecasting, and production reports.

Check out Washingtons Green Grocer today!

From the award announcement,

We are pleased to announce that Drupal has won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. This category featured a very close contest between the top three, Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla! in which Drupal ended up as the overall choice for the judges and the public.

This is the highest award that Drupal was eligible for in 2009. Drupal previously won for Best Overall CMS in 2007 and 2008 has been placed in the Hall of Fame. The winners of the Hall of Fame Drupal awards for best Drupal theme and best Drupal contributed module will be awarded Thursday, November 12th, 2009. The themes and modules nominated were selected both for the most used and for a diverse set of nominees.

We use Drupal exclusively for building customized, scalable high end web applications. It’s no surprise developers, designers and users keep voting Drupal as Best CMS for years in a row. There is nothing you cannot do with Drupal. Being a CMF (content management framework), it is not pigeonholed into any one particular niche like Wordpress (strictly blogging applications).

What has Inclind done with Drupal?

• Integration with Microsoft Dynamics SOP System into Ubercart for product importing and inventory management
• Integration with Ubercart and Drupal into UPS Worldship for rock solid quoting
• Integration with UPS Worldship for automatic label printing for commerce orders
• Integration with Amazon S3 services for synced failsafe CDN (Content Distribution Network) support
• Integration with Windows LDAP Protocol support
• Integration with Invision Power Board Forum for external authentication of users through Drupal
• Integrated Ubercart as a management application of customers with interval based shipping orders (drop shipment / bulk ordering)
• Built routing algorithms to track and route best delivery methods for truck drivers on to Google Maps
• Built over 100 custom modules to meet the needs of individual clients
• … with more to come

Who else uses Drupal? Check it out!

• AOL
• The White House
• Yahoo
• IBM
• Bob Dylan
• The Onion
• CNN
• Metallica
• United Nations
• jQuery
• Sony BMG
• Michael Jackson
• Ozzy Osbourne
• EA Games
• Star Trek Online
• Mastodon
• Warner Bros
• CKY
• MTV
• MTV2
• SpreadFirefox
• SpreadThunderbird
• Computer World