bikesoup

Yesterday one of my side projects went live: www.bikesoup.co.uk .

Last December Anthony approached me about doing the site and I agreed to work on it in my free time. It took a while, but this included finding a designer ( d2tstudio ), going through the process of finding a feature set for the launch and the programming. And all of this while I started my new proper job at Softonic, which means I didn't really have as much time to invest in it as I would have liked.

The site is a pretty standard e-commerce / classified ad site tailored to bicycles. But as with every project there are some special requests which makes it interesting to work on, like the payment and billing system.

For me it was especially nice to do all the programming from beginning to end on my own and being able to choose the technologies I like to work with. Anthony pretty much lets me decide all the technical bits.

The site is build completely on open source technologies and I might be able to give something back in the future too.

• CentOS for the server OS 
• Fedora on the development machine
• PHP as the language 
• MySQL database
• memcached
• symfony 1.4 as the web framework, with some plugins
• sfImageTransformPlugin and sfImageTransformExtraPlugin for image transformations 
• swCombinePlugin for JavaScript and CSS optimization
• ioMenuPlugin for the menus
• ... 
•  jQuery JavaScript framework 
• colorbox plugin for overlays
• dataTables for Ajax tables
• jcarousel for slideshows
• git as source control
• Eclipse IDE
• bugzilla a bug tracker

The current version is just the first milestone and there is still a lot of work to do. But first I am looking forward to see if there is any interest in a site like this and what the users want from it in the future.