Bikesoup

I just finished converting the bikesoup search to use the sphinx search engine instead of a simple doctrine fulltext search with filters. One thing I found helpful are sphinx config scripts. Instead of hard-coding the configuration you can use any scripting language to produce the sphinx configuration. The just have to start with ‘#!’ and sphinx will execute them and use the output as the configuration. This is the simplified version of my main config file /etc/sphinx/sphinx.conf : ...

I have been one of the many converts to git and try to use it whenever possible. So far this has been mostly for smaller project, open source projects, Fedora and a little bit at work. bikesoup is my first bigger project using git. I started with initial development on the master branch and created feature branches which got merged back into master. Before going live for the first time I created a live branch. This is pretty much what you would do in subversion too, maybe with the exception of any feature branches. Once the site went live I created a feature branch off master for each issue in bugzilla I am currently working on. When I am happy with the fix I merge it back into it. And when the feature goes live it the feature branch is also merged into live. The diagram below shows this process. ...

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.