Go to Cherrytree to check out the 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.

The system let us build the new public site and have it run alongside the existing member's site and the existing public site. This let us tweak it, get feedback from selected sources and make sure it was all ready before 'flicking the switch'.

Using the auto-include mechanism for templates made it realy simple to swap out individual templates on-the-fly so that logging in was a simple matter of switch the basename of the template folder. That means you can swap out the bits that need to be changed while leaving in the bits that don't. For example the record listing template that manages the display of the lists is common to both sites, so we only need one copy of that file. The individual record item template is different, so we need to swap it when you log in. It also means we can do A/B testing really easily based on any criteria we wish to apply.

The other big peice of work on the new site was search. The existing search was a simple database lookup - the standard AND and OR search. As the size of the catalogue grew this was no longer good enough. So we decided to get Google. But after some time and much gnashing of teeth we found that Google didn't do what we wanted. So it was back to the drawing board. One thing I have learned in this project is that search is hard. To do it well is not a simple thing at all. But with some perserverance we now have a search functionality that seems to be working well. It brings back relevant results and ranks them in a logical way. If what you are looking for it there, it is usually on the first page of results.

As with all things, this is going to evolve as the site grows. And that is the beauty of DevCore - it is made to evolve as the site does.