It has been two weeks since I posted - but in all honest truth we have been so unbelievably busy. We have had a visit from Bruce Thurlow from Adventure Tours and Oz Experience for the past two weeks as we approach the final run in to the new Adventure Tours website as well as three websites going live - being Backpacking Queensland, Fletcher Living at Jacks Point and Waiata Lodge.

As most know the launch of Backpacking Queensland was drastically delayed by issues with hosting which are now thankfully resolved although Michael Gall had to do a last minute complete reprogramme of the Silver Stripe manifest builder to cop with the lower availability of memory on the host.

Anyway, today I want to address an email I received from Simon Gehert regarding Backpacking Queenslands’ new site and use it as an ideal opportunity to introduce you to some of the things we have done for the site. I quote

“Rarely have we seen something more obviously shoehorned into existing technology where it shouldn’t be. Take an open source CMS you didn’t develop complete with tag clouds, social network site links, unrelated blog headline feeds, google maps etc ,which was never intended for this purpose, add some crap interface design, a link to your site in the footer which says “Well made in New Zealand by Xebidy … and you have all the makings for a car crash of epic proportions.”

So ripping into it, for those that don’t know, the content management server that we develop on is based on the Silver Stripe platform. We didn’t develop Silver Stripe we just use it; and have greatly extended it. We chose to use Silver Stripe on this project (and most projects we do) because it is Open Source and we firmly believe in an Open Source philosophy. From a client’s point of view they get the code, the get a system that anyone can develop, and when the have moved on from Xebidy they can theoretically go out to any web developer and continued to get the system supported and extended.

Using a proprietary in house system restricts the website owner to that development company; if the company no longer drives the CMS development the client is inevitably left high and dry with a system they have outgrown and no one to support them. The Internet is moving so fast at the moment that you need a system that keeps pace with these changes, in-house systems inevitably are developed using clients’ money - if a client wants a feature then they pay for that to be developed in the CMS. In an Open Source environment many developers from all over the world are continually developing the system and trying to make it better for themselves and then sharing those advances back to the users. The system evolves faster and inevitably better. Take the example of the manifest builder in Silver Stripe; one of its’ weaknesses has always been the way it compiles all the PHP code when the site is first called - it uses a larger amount of memory than most hosting companies are happy to make available. When Michael Gall redeveloped the way the manifest builder worked to be used on the Backpacking Queensland host the first thing he did was put it back out to the development community, apart from being met with enormous cheers, he suddenly found himself with a huge amount of debugging help as everyone looks to incorporate it into their projects and into the main (trunk) system.

Silver Stripe is not the only Open Source content management system in the market, and is in fact in the whole scheme of things, a very small system; but there were a number of other factors in our decision making process. Firstly, it is developed in PHP5 which is quite a step up from PHP4, it is more structured, which suits a lot of the Java contractors we have had on board, and in our opinion is future proofing the development for some time to come. Secondly, at the time of choosing Silver Stripe it had recently been accepted for the Google Summer of Code which means Google sponsors a handful of projects across the world to have their projects developed under Google supervision - we thought this was a great tick of acceptance for the system. Thirdly, Silver Stripe actually provided a good framework for the guys to develop a lot of the other stuff we do beyond just the websites; such as our travel planner which is developed completely inside the framework. Finally, we choose Silver Stripe because it was developed in New Zealand and we thought that being a New Zealand company ourselves and promoting Open Source technologies to so many international clients is made sense to support local home grown that is well run and has a similar ethos.

It looks like this is going to be a long post, so I will break it into a few posts over the next few days and deal with some of the functionality then. But just to close there is one important point to reintroduce about the Silver Stripe content management server. Earlier on this year we undertook a huge interface change to the basic CMS. Having used lots of CMS’s over the years I wanted something in which the user interface and ability to build new pages was really easy and that the client did not have to keep coming back to get more pages developed etc. Xebidy developed the now popular Bootstrap interface which allows a user to drag components (which anyone can easily have developed by any web company knowing PHP) onto a page layout and thus build or redesign pages easily on the fly. This means a site can be easily extended or even redesigned at any point in the future without the massive effort that took place in the last few months with Backpacking Queensland in re-entering all their data. We think Bootstrap on the Silver Stripe platform is something very special and certainly the feedback we are getting from our many clients and the Open Source community says so also. For those interested in finding out more about Bootstrap here is a video of Davis Hammon presenting an earlier version and a demo is also available here.

Tags: Adventure Tours, Backpacking Queensland, Bootstrap, Fletcher Living, Silver Stripe, Waiata Lodge, Xebidy clients

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 9:00 am and is filed under Opinion, Xebidy clients. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.