The seed

Hogash team, also known for some of the best of breed themes on Themeforest, has been developing and maintaining Kallyas WordPress theme through the past 7 years. In the summer of 2018, the lead developer decided it was time for a quality and user experience improvement.

And the kernel needed to grow…

Even if Kallyas theme already had a multitude of features through its built-in page builder, we knew that in order to maintain a high standard of quality products, bringing something new to the table was needed. It was time for the new standalone page builder plugin.

We established the main guidelines , by creating the wire-frames which envisioned our product. In order to intersect our vision with the needs of our current users, we launched a survey asking about the user satisfaction and future expectations. We received both bad reviews and at the opposite pole very good reviews. The important thing is that we got feedback from users. This is how we managed to establish the main directions and features.

The seed was the core of Kallyas

The grow

This stage was the longest and full of events in development. Based on Vuejs, as the main JavaScript framework, we encountered changes to different NPM packages used, by upgrading or installing other dependencies. We also tried our best to create our own “micro frameworks” and not rely too much on external libraries. This involved extra research and extra hours of test and code rewriting .

the unpredictable…

So after establishing the main structure of code, we realized that after weeks of testing, the product needed extra features for user experience, which asked for code rewriting. Working on a large scale app, it is not easy to predict changes that may occur during development which may affect the app’s structure. So there was a continuous loop for about 4 months of rewriting and rethinking functions, structure and methods previously added.

The team behind

What is special about a big product is that the team behind it is a small one. In contrast to other giant competitors, with huge teams behind their apps, our team consists of 3 developers and 3 designers.

This was both brave and easy, as it challenged us to gain new skills meanwhile strengthen the team spirit and maintain a control of code quality.

The fruit harvest

After the long process of developing the app, time to step into the era of harvesting has arrived. No matter how long it took for the seed to develop into a fruit, the satisfaction of eating the fruit from the plant you grew, is incomparable. We proved ourselves that we can develop a seed into a fruit. Now it is time to get all the benefits from it.

Our website https://zionbuilder.io/ provides a wider view of Zion Builder plugin, its features and the story behind.