The one about how we built BlueFootCMS, and how it later became Adobe Commerce’s Page Builder.

It’s 2016. GENE is now four years old and already has some aha clients, such as Hornby Hobbies, the brand owner of Scalextric. 

We had already success building software for PayPal’s Braintree on Magento. This became the foundation of our relationship with the financial services company as the exclusive extension developers on Magento. 

Landing pages should be quick and easy, right?

Every client we worked on was lamenting the same fortune. Could there be an easy way to create landing pages on their Magento stores? Without involving developers for relatively simple changes?

We also had some problems ourselves. As developers, we spent a lot of time adding config for the client to be able to manage the content. This was expensive (for them.) 

See? The ecommerce world was slowly becoming a different place. Google had been proclaiming “content is king” for a few years now, and merchants knew that if they wanted to compete, they needed to accelerate their content efforts. 

We set out to the task of building the first no-code, drag-and-drop page building and CMS technology. A few months later, we came out with a gift to the Magento community: BlueFootCMS. 

We’ve always had an interest in biology at GENE. We named the CMS extension after the blue-footed booby, a species of bird from the Pacific Ocean. They get their name for their bright blue feet, which they use in their mating ritual to impress the ladies. We thought there was an analogy to how merchants showcase their wares to potential customers. 

Flying to Las Vegas with our blue feet

With BlueFootCMS under our wings, we travelled to Las Vegas Imagine to show the technology to anyone that would listen. Many people did! 

After that, we released the extension and it became super popular – after all, people really needed it.

Not long after, Adobe made an offer to buy BlueFootCMS around the same time they bought Magento Commerce. They wanted to offer a Page Building CMS on the core codebase, enabling merchants to design their own landing pages. 

Bluefoot has enjoyed rapid adoption and endorsements from the Magento ecosystem since its initial release at Imagine earlier in the year. After exhaustive conversations with both merchants and solution partners we felt it was critical to make this technology a core part of the Magento platform.

Peter Sheldon, Adobe

The sad news? To account for the more out-of-the-box nature of the tool, Adobe renamed it “Page Builder”. Yes, the name works fine, but we would be lying if we said we don’t miss our little blue-footed friend. 

Next time you use Page Builder on Magento, you are using the code we lovingly wrote for the Magento community. Im-peck-able