This was a massive project in the end, with prices and avalaiblity updated automatically and integration with their back-end accounting systems giving them an end-to-end system.
DevCore - the developer friendly Content Management System
DevCore - The CMS that let's you, the developer, build and deploy websites and web applications with ease.
Rapid development has never been easier.
The New Zealand Transport Agency
The New Zealand Transport Agency was formed from two large government departments. DevCore was used to bring together the content from the different websites into a single entity.
This was a very large and complex build.
Marselme
Marselme is a boutique e-commerce site that sells high quality merino wool clothes for babies and children. This was an interesting site to build. The design parameters changed half way through the process and there were issues with designers... it would have been enough to drive a developer insane.
Cherrytree - The club for smart shoppers - members site
Cherrytree is a shopping club that buys goods at wholesale prices and then passes those goods to its members.
BGI Developments
BGI Developments is a start-up that is going places really fast. They needed a website yesterday.
That's where DevCore really came into its own. The hosting arrangement was non-standard. Effectively we had to run a newer version of DevCore inside an older version in order to deploy their new site without affecting an existing site.
This saved time and money on setting up a completely new site.
Domett Trailers
Domett Trailers manufactures truck trailers. They need a new site to cope with the increasing demand for their products, and to showcase all the different types of trailers they can build.
The trailer galleries were all built from scratch, as was the trailer database where clients can log in to get all the information about their trailers - right down to the component parts used!
RightCar
The RightCar website is one of the sites under the NZTA mantle. It is useful for checking out the safety and fuel efficiency of cars and other interesting facts like emmissions etc.
This was a slightly different build for DevCore. most of the dynamic content is served up via web services, instead of being pulled from a database.
Cherrytree - The club for smart shoppers - public site
Following on from the success of the members only website, the people at Cherrytree wanted to update their public website. So using the existing DevCore codebase we simply added a few new folders, a few new classes, and the site was good to go.
Rightcar Mobile Plate Search
This subsite is an addition to the successful RightCar site.
It is tailored to mobile users who are looking for a new car.
They can enter the licence plate of a vehicle and see all the relevant safety information for that particular model of car.
The problem
Programmers solve problems. It's what they do. That's how DevCore came into being. I had a problem I needed to solve that was driving me nuts.
I was building websites with tight timeframes, no budget, no design specs, frantically copy-and-pasting then re-inventing code to enable similar functionality.
In the early days, at NZ Police, downloading a CMS from the web was not an option, so I had to come up with the solutions myself.
Later at Chromtoaster we were using CMSs from the web. Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress were all fine for doing what they were designed for. But what I was building almost never fitted the intended use of the product.
So I had to hack into the core code of the system to make it do what the client wanted.
This was a scary place to be. I still had tight deadlines, and now I needed to get my head around a whole new way of doing things.
I had to fix bugs, security holes you could drive a truck through, and conflicting logic before I even had the chance to build the requested features.
Inevitably this took much longer than if I had built the system myself from scratch.
The solution
I spent my weekends and free time after work designing, building, refining my idea of a core framework that would suit my needs.
Then we had a project come up that was just right for a test of the concept. I was given the go-ahead to use DevCore for the website, and started building the site.
It was one of those rare builds where I had all the information I need up front. I knew exactly what I had to build and what functionality was required.
Less than ten days later the site was up and finished (from a developer perspective). Everything worked as it should, all that was needed was for the design to be applied.
Our front end wizard was able to apply the template to the site running live data and videos, which made his job much easier.
This was easily the fastest, most enjoyable site I have ever built. And the client loved it!
But then...
Shortly after, the client wanted another version of the site. This one would run a bit differently, but still operate in a similar fashion. This build was even faster. It took an afternoon to set up a new instance and make the necessary changes.
My colleague wanted to have a try with the CMS on a new site he was building, so I gave him a copy of the code and watched as he installed it.
Shock Horror!!
He changed the folders where my code was based. He changed file names to suit what he wanted. In the space of five minutes my lovely structured code was all over the place.
He pulled up the home page of the CMS and naturally he had errors, files not found etc.
It took ten to twenty minutes to change some system constants and test the site structure fully, but in the end he had the site working again.
But now it was in his paradigm, with his folder structure, his filenames, his was of doing things.
That's what this is all about!
We were both quite excited about where this would lead for us as developers. Our lives were about to become a whole lot easier.