Cadbury
Continuing our long term Laravel success with a festive Advent Calendar experience
Following the ongoing success of Cadbury’s “Quizmas Countdown” Christmas calendar campaign, which Cyber-Duck has worked on for four years, Mondelez wished to reboot the digital experience again for Christmas 2022 with some additional enhancements.
Key stats
35%
increase in users from 2021 to 2022
Zero
downtime from the hosting infrastructure, even during peak traffic
6 weeks
delivery period, on time for Advent season!
What was this project about?
Inspired by its brand strapline of "Sharing Good Times", Cadbury Heroes customers have been enjoying the Cadbury Quizmas Countdown, a fun digital interactive gamification of the advent calendar experience. A user is invited to sign up when they purchase a physical Cadbury Heroes advent calendar; this user then becomes the host, and they can invite friends and family to compete against in the quiz.
Just like a traditional Advent Calendar, users open a door every day and answer themed questions. The quiz features reminders, push notifications and a leaderboard to keep players engaged and having fun throughout the run-up to Christmas.
2022 marked Cyber-Duck’s fourth Christmas working on this project. The original quiz was launched in 2019, with Cyber-Duck providing technical Laravel and Vue.JS implementation as well as DevOps hosting and support. Since then, we have carried out technical implementation on three new iterations of the Quizmas Countdown, demonstrating the long-term flexibility and scalability of Laravel platforms.
Objectives
- Implement Laravel updates and provide necessary technical support to ensure the quiz could continue to perform well for 2022, able to handle up to 800,000 visitors.
- Make minor UI updates to bring the quiz up to date for 2022, building on work previously done in collaboration with DesignBridge.
- Ensure sure users are enjoying a frustration-free quiz experience and most importantly, having fun!
How was the original quiz developed with Laravel?
Applying Agile methodology, our team developed and deployed the original quiz in just 7 weeks, launching the first version for Christmas 2019.
We worked closely with the client’s teams, prioritising the features for the project from a full Agile backlog. Daily stand-ups and weekly show-and-tells ensured full transparency and an efficient, communicative working process throughout.
Our technical team built the backend of the quiz in Laravel, which stored the game logic server-side. Using Vue.JS, we created a Single Page App (SPA). Some components were built as a Progressive Web App (PWA), such as detecting the capabilities of the device and when a user went online. We took full advantage of these PWA capabilities and Vue.JS to create a fluid, intuitive game that felt more like an app than a website.
Vue.JS technology also meant we could pre-load all the assets, so the experience was fast and responsive once a user started to play. This was particularly important because the quiz had different types of multimedia assets incorporated within it, including video.
We built a secure database to store the questions and answers; the users, groups, user and group scores; and a way to share the logic with friends using a unique link. To enable the web to interact with this database, we developed a custom API that validated all data endpoints and could retrieve a user’s running answers each day through cookies.
Cadbury wanted to have the website secure and capable of handling up to 800,000 visitors joining the quiz at a time. So, we architected scalable hosting on Amazon Web Services (AWS), using Cloudflare for caching and as a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
As with all Laravel projects, we made sure to fully understand Cadbury’s vision for the quiz and to align with the business’ goals and strategy before moving into the development stage. This enabled us to build software requirements into the development roadmap, laying strong foundations for us to continue working with Cadbury to add additional features and tweaks as required.
Delivering success over time
Laravel is an ideal framework for scaling and evolving over time, but to do so successfully, it's important to keep the ecosystem well maintained and up to date. This is why we always recommend regular maintenance as part of the development process, using monitoring tools visualised into dashboards.
These tools allow us to easily keep an eye on the application’s performance and any errors that might affect performance, allowing us to prioritise effectively across areas such as security, hosting and performance.
We completed maintenance and code auditing for the 2022 Quizmas Countdown, ensuring the Laravel and PHP framework underpinning the quiz was performing optimally for its users.
This year, we also contributed to some UI changes to update the visuals for 2022. Our maintenance work helped to ensure that the quiz was technically capable of handling the number of visitors expected for 2022, while also keeping players entertained and having fun with family and friends. This Christmas saw 159,000 quizzers taking part, representing a 35% increase on the number of players in 2021.
We’re proud of the ongoing working relationship we have built with Cadbury and the Mondelez group. This project is a great example of how Laravel provides the perfect platform to scale and evolve over time with regular maintenance and monitoring, demonstrating why we choose to use this framework for so many of our clients’ custom web application projects.
Key stats
35%
increase in users from 2021 to 2022
Zero
downtime from the hosting infrastructure, even during peak traffic
6 weeks
delivery period, on time for Advent season!