Aug3
The Gift Company approached Jackie and I to help them with a complete makeover of their (now archived) old site. The old site had served the previous owners of The Gift Company well but the new owners, Graham and Michelle, wanted to carry through the new branding onto the website.
The new site needed to allow engaged couples to register and create an online Bridal Registry by adding products from the website. Each couple would have their own unique url (eg. www.thegiftcompany.co.za/amanda-and-dave) for their registry, friends and family could then visit this page and purchase items off their bridal list. Visitors to the site would need to be able to purchase products seperately too.
I built the site using Zend Framework. I chose ZF because of it’s flexibility, power, speed and potential to scale if need be. For the ecommerce part of the site, I recommended PayGate. I have worked with PayGate about 4 times now but this was the first time I’ve worked with their new SecureCode option. Their documentation is really good and it’s not much different other than the extra verifcation step. I went through some of the code I had written on previous PayGate solutions and then wrote one for ZF. I wrote a PaymentGateway ‘factory’ to use as a loader and then wrote the PayGatePayXML class. The cart system uses AJAX and I wrote a ‘mini-api’ in the CartController to allow for more secure ajax requests and to plug into flash (if need be). I built an indexed search for Products and Bridal lists but had a lot of issues with this during launch thanks to a certain automated script. The ZF search class has to create an index lock for each search. It turns out Hetzner (hosting company) have a script which runs at 10pm each night altering ownership of files (including index.lock). So each morning we’d be getting errors thrown on search. Solution was a cron job at Hetzner resetting ownership back but debugging that wasn’t fun!
I am very happy with The Gift Company website from every angle. ZF ensures that the code you write is reusable and I hope to publish the PayGate v4 class once I’ve refined it a bit more.
May14
A project I developed at Stonewall recently went live. http://www.eafricacommission.org.
The website is built around Drupal 5.5 and is fairly generic. I find that Drupal works great for rapid development provided the company is not a startup (ie decisions are changing rapidly). I don’t find Drupal flexible enough but for some basic/freelance projects it’s perfect. The Nepad website was perfect for Drupal but I did face a challenge when they wanted to customize their newsletter interface. Certain Drupal Modules are written in a way that they are easy to customize without hacking into the core of the module. The newsletter module is not written this way. It’s an old module and we ended up adjusting the interface to work with it.
I can see myself using Drupal a lot more in future but primarily on freelance jobs. I find the CMS interface and functionality a bit chunky and quite cluttered. I like a CMS interface that is very clean and only has things you use on it. With Drupal this is not the case. I suppose if you are some sort of Drupal Wizard you can strip it down but this would have to be done very carefully so as to not hack the core.
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Jan29
I’ve been playing with Drupal recently and I’ve put together some links to help anyone interested in learning.
Drupal learning curve.
Zend Framework is still my preferred custom framework but Drupal has impressed me with the way it’s put together. It’s very scalable and powerful – you can put together a full community site in about 30 minutes without writing any PHP. That’s rapid development. The community is active and there are a ton of modules. I am sure I will learn new things about it as I go along but for now I recommend checking it out!
Dec30
I have officially converted. I had my eye on a Mac for about 4 months and finally took the plunge in the last week of December. Partly for the specs and mainly because it runs on FreeBSD. I wish it was a christmas present but unfortunately I had to part with the cash – ouch. MacBook Pro 15″ with Leopard – it’s quick!
I’ve spent the past week prepping/cleaning my data to move it across. Shrinking my Outlook PST file, found this nifty app which converts PST to Mac Mail format. The data was pushed over to my trusty USB drive and then copied across. The conversion has been fairly uneventful with some frantic googling for arb things like “how do i page down” and “where the hell is the delete key”. But (L)AMP is setup now, imported all my db’s and just downloaded Zend Studio for Mac. It’s starting to feel like home, a clean pretty home.
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Nov9
I am starting to prefer Flash as an interface more and more each day – beautiful interface married to db-driven backend – the best of both worlds. I just don’t see decent Flash websites coming out of South Africa which is annoying me.
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