ZomboDB

Kickoff

A Database Extension Without a Website

ZomboDB is Eric Ridge’s Postgres extension, and it keeps a Postgres table’s text indexed in Elasticsearch, so you can search it through Elasticsearch from plain SQL. By 2017 it had a four-year history in production, but the fact that it was open source had been its only marketing. We didn’t build ZomboDB, and never worked on its code. Our job was everything around it: its look and its voice, and the website people would find it on.

We started with a kickoff, and asked about the company, the product, the people buying it and how it should sound. The audience was startups or large enterprises already using Postgres, with very large amounts of text to search or analyze. The words for the voice were experienced, reliable and trustworthy, because ZomboDB’s customers used it to make important and sometimes expensive decisions, so reliability and correctness came first. And with a name like ZomboDB, there had to be room for something playful too.

The brand

Big Corp of America, and the Next Big Thing

We began the branding exploration by reviewing what others in the space were doing. Most leaned on darker blues and greens, a traditional enterprise feel that also nods to Postgres itself. Then we drew up two personas, which we called Big Corp of America and the Next Big Thing: larger, more traditional companies with medium-sized teams and bigger budgets, and startups with small teams of a few people, going after the open source code.

To appeal to both, we kept blue and green as the main colours but lightened them, playful with “Zombo” in mind, and kept a yellow and a purple for anything that had to stand out. For type we set three options side by side and chose Raleway for headings over Montserrat and Roboto, because its few fun characters let ZomboDB stand out just a little, with Open Sans for the body.

The logo took three rounds. It ended as a cluster of five hexagons, one of them blue, over a wordmark whose “DB” is set in the same blue: it stood out, but still looked at home in a list of database providers.

The guide

A Branding Guide to Hand On

All of it went into a branding guide: the research and the personas, the colour scheme, the type, the logo, and a page on personality, with the keywords experienced, reliable and trustworthy and a long list of words to use, from dependable and honest to seasoned and steady. Its advice for writing was to sound professional, with a bit of a playful tone, and to put a little of yourself into the text.

The guide ended with the website, so it carried the plan for the site too: a home page with a “Why ZomboDB” section explained with simple icons, a button to the open source code, and a place for a list of clients, which would help a young product look legitimate. With it, ZomboDB could hand the same direction to any future vendor and stay consistent across print, digital and the web.

The website

Five Weeks, Made to Hand Over

The proposal for the website was signed on 3 March 2017, and the first commit is from the same day. We built it as a static site with Middleman, in Slim templates on Bootstrap, and served it from Amazon S3 through CloudFront. There was no server to keep running and very little to pay for, and a static site suited the goal in the proposal, which was a site Eric could manage without us.

Every page wears the brand. The home page opens on the logo’s blue with a network of hexagons, one of them holding the Postgres elephant, and explains ZomboDB with six features, each with its own icon in a green-to-blue gradient taken from the logo. Its big button, Start Now for Free, goes straight to the releases. The Services page, in the same blue, asks people to get in touch for help with ZomboDB, and there was a blog, too.

Eric reviewed it as it came together, the features on the home page were reworded from those comments, and the list of client logos from the plan came out before launch, for now. By 6 April we’d made 214 commits.

Every release

Back to 2015, on Day One

A release finder is only as good as its list, so we didn’t launch with an empty one. We wrote a script that went through ZomboDB’s past releases on GitHub, through GitHub’s API, and made a page for each, with its release notes, its issue numbers turned into links, and its files downloaded alongside it. That brought in 57 releases, every one but the very first, back to August 2015.

Each release’s page has two big buttons, for the Elasticsearch plugin and the Postgres extension, and the name of each file comes from a pattern for each Linux in one data file. Your choices ride along in the address, so a release’s page opens with them already filled in, and the back button takes you to the same results. There’s always a page at /releases/latest/, with its own copies of the newest release’s files, and every download was counted in Google Analytics.

Handing it over

One Command for a New Release

So that Eric could publish a release without us, we wrote a Middleman extension of our own and published it as an open source gem, middleman-releases. It reads a folder of releases, one Markdown file each with its date and the versions it supports, and runs the list, the latest page and the release pages. One command, middleman release v4.0.0 --date … --edit, makes a new release from a template and opens it for editing.

From there it’s a short list: write the release notes, adjust the versions it supports, drop in the files and run the deploy script, which uploads the site and clears CloudFront’s cache. A second script then tags the release on GitHub, with notes that link back to the website. It was all written up in the project’s README, which the proposal promised.

Eric published the first release through the site on 17 April 2017, and by March 2020 had published 47 of them, in 82 commits, adding Postgres 10, new versions of Ubuntu and new versions of Elasticsearch to the data file as ZomboDB grew. The home page’s headline, which launched as “Making Postgres and Elasticsearch work together like it’s 2015”, got its year moved on by hand, to 2017 that April and then on through each new year.

The relaunch

Back Again in 2020

In February 2020 ZomboDB came back to us with a new direction. Eric wanted the site to say clearly that the core of ZomboDB is open source and that professional services were on offer, and to bring in recurring revenue through sponsorships. The prebuilt releases were moving to paying customers, so the blog and the public Releases page were to go, as ZomboDB didn’t expect to offer them again.

We brought the site up to date with a newer Ruby and newer gems, then took out the blog and the release finder and built what replaced them: a documentation section, a Professional Services page with four sponsorship tiers, a private portal where each paying customer downloads the binaries, and calls to register and to read the docs. Each tier takes one of the brand’s four colours, with its emblem in one of the logo’s hexagons. In July 2020 the relaunch was merged into Eric’s own copy of the site.

The release pages stayed, and so did middleman-releases. Eric went on publishing through it until the last release went out on 1 March 2025, by which time the site held 151 of them, and kept moving the home page’s year along too, as far as “like it’s 2023”.