supersonic feet

As part of my work at Net Effects, since Christmas last year I’ve been working on a new online shopping system wherever other client work allows. For a good few years, Net Effects have run an online shopping site called UK Shopability but when I joined the company last year they had already started getting a bit fed up with the old system.

The old Shopability suppliers stopped doing online mail order recently, having been bought out, so the decision was made to start a new site to re-launch the whole thing, working with the main distributor of disability products. And thus was born Disability Warehouse, an online shop for disability-related products.

We opened the site up to orders a couple of days ago and already a few have been coming through despite not advertising the site yet, so it’s looking good.

The site uses AJAX in places (mainly for adding an item to your cart and admin functions), though this is a site aimed at users with disabilities so it degrades properly if JavaScript is turned off and just submits a form the old-fashioned way. Some bits of the site are still being fine-tuned (e.g. product images that are missing), but the site is ready to go which is why it’s now open to sales without much fanfare - we’ll get a low volume of real sales to start to make sure everything really does work (it does so far!) before we ramp up to inviting all the many customers over from the old Shopability site.

I’m really getting into Ruby and Rails now - I don’t think I’ve touched a PHP script for over a week now (and this for someone who’s been writing PHP apps for six years!).

Obviously my job is as a PHP developer, but I’ve been fortunate enough to get my current project going in Rails rather than PHP so I’ve even been using Rails at work. That’ll change shortly as an existing client has some major additions to be made to the PHP-based system I wrote for them and I’m actually kind of dreading having to make the changes in PHP.

As much as I wrote the system to be as extensible as possible, the rapid prototyping and then main development possible with Ruby on Rails really gets you used to the good life. It shouldn’t actually be that bad as the system I wrote is reasonably similar in structure to Rails and even goes further in some parts (full form-building code), but there are certain things that either Ruby or Rails just make simpler (and quicker) than anything you can do with PHP (and I didn’t think I’d ever say that).

In my spare time I’ve been working on a content management system in Rails, primarily for two related projects, but also hopefully as a general system I can re-use on more websites. The speed at which I’ve been able to build it up is great, to the point where from a few weeks of programming where I get a bit of spare time here and there I now have a basic CMS handling logins, dynamic menu/sitemap generation, calendar system, news, general content pages, swish permissions back-end admin and even the beginnings of a file/image manager to be incorporated into TinyMCE to help non-techy authors who’ll be working on the finished websites.

The two websites in question are the Maserati Resource Centre (a non-commercial info resource and community for Maserati enthusiasts run by my Dad) and The Maserati Club (the international club). Both sites are in need of a serious update and I’ve re-designed them both as well (TMC site in conjunction with Andy Katz), but it’ll still be a month or two before the CMS is ready for either to go live.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying getting further into this Rails lark and building up what will hopefully be a very nice content management system when finished. I’ll post little screenshots once it’s a bit further along, though I’m trying to keep both site designs largely under wraps, so they’ll be more snippets than full screens.