City Coupons

Beaver6813 — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:24:06 +0000

City Coupons, a very recent project, in essence is a full content management for coupons. Using the system you are able to add printable, SMS and viewable coupons to your website. In addition to this, the system has a range of other features to offer. Started at the beginning of November ’09 and completed with version 1.0.2 in February ’10 its certainly been a large but exciting project.

Startup

In November I was asked to create a piece of coupon management software that would:

Allow businesses to sign up and pay automatically.
Enable businesses to manage their business profiles on the site, including locations, media, descriptions and above all coupons & offers.
Give the site administrator full control over the site in the simplest way possible.
To incorporate some sort of events calendar into the site that would gather all invidual business events.

We started with a basic design which was heavily edited to fit with the feel of the site. I then started work on coding the back-end into classes (object orientated) to make upgrading and modifying the site a lot more modular.

Payment System

The site is integrated with the PayPal IPN payment processing which will, after a business has gone through checkout, notify the site and will automatically activate their account. In addition to this it also has an automated billing program that will periodically check to ensure that all businesses are up to date on their payments. If not it will send the business an invoice with three days grace period. After that their account will be suspended until they activate their account. Of course this can always be overridden in the site admin panel.

Business Page & Coupons

An important aspect of the site was enabling businesses to have their own “online presence”, this was achieved by giving each business their own profile page in addition to their various offers appearing site-wide. On this page businesses can display all of their locations alongside Google Maps, uploaded media, events and other exciting items.

Having a list of offers on the website may not be much use to a lot of people, City Coupons enables users to print and send the offer to their cell phone. The printing system used is major improvement over the type used on similar coupon websites. It enables you to specify the quantity of the coupon you wish to print and even place different coupons on the same page if you bookmark them. The SMS service has no operating costs and uses data processing techniques specific to each major carrier in the US.

Administering the Site

In the Vendor Admin Panel (for businesses) you are able to easily modify any aspect of your profile through the various tabs on the page conveniently titled, Offers, Locations, Events, Media, Profile etc. Likewise the Site Admin Panel is arranged similarly but with a wide range of options from full user management to bulk newsletter services and footer modifications.

To make the system even more interactive; it is integrated with the WordPress blog system to provide the blogging and article aspects of the site. WordPress is one of the best systems in the world for this and it would be senseless to reinvent the wheel. It however does include several City Coupons themes and plugins for full integration with the member system and site design.

The default site design is easily customizable and is available in a variety of colours, some different colours used by current owners of the system are shown in the thumbnails below.

Conclusion

Overall the City Coupons project was great fun and as always I developed my programming skills. My knowledge of WordPress has been greatly improved, my coding standards have risen significantly and I now know how to generate PDF’s from pure PHP! The client had a firm vision of what the site should be like and it certainly helped me to create exactly what he envisioned.

Twerq

Beaver6813 — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:22:44 +0000

I worked on Twerq roughly three years ago now and it has been one of the biggest projects I’ve undertaken to date. At its core Twerq enables users to very easily search and find multiple items all in one go. It was one of the first services to “mashup” content, pulling together videos, images and text to help the user to find all the information they could possibly need on a specified search term. In addition to regular searches it also parses rss feeds on some of the worlds most popular news sources such as the BBC, Reuters and CNN.

It features repeat searching, bulk searching, mashups, rss feeds. For me the biggest challenge in this project was creating it so it was both scalable and as feature packed as it could possibly be. Search engine API’s were used a lot in the construction of the project, Google, Yahoo etc. For those items that did not feature API’s I had to use a technique called page scraping or “data mining” to retrieve the desired information for processing. To make this process even more efficienct I implemented caching to reduce bandwidth and overall load on the server.

Unlike FetchMP3, a more recent project, Twerq was not put through a formal closed beta test phase, instead we thoroughly tested at each stage of development to ensure that all was functioning as should be before a public beta.

This website required a combination of skills including:

XHTML/CSS (WC3 valid)
PHP/MySQL
Additional Server Module Installation for PHP and Apache etc
Javascript/AJAX (jQuery library)

Twerq has so many features it would be impossible to explain them all here so check it out at http://www.twerq.com.