A custom project to create a site that would be a store front to sale coupons and t-shirts from content that was produced by a seperate sports blog. This project was done along with Mike Rutherford, Trevor Joelson, and Art Carmody.
Requirements
- A custom logo that resembled an old Cafe logo
- A modified shopping cart solution that would be able to generate unique barcodes for coupons purchased through the site, similar to Groupon.
- The site’s main purpose would be to be used for blog posting.
- Integration with Twitter to display the latest tweets with the hastag #CarmodysCafe and to allow visitors on their Twitter feeds from the site.
- A image gallery feature to contain community images that had become popular.
- Comment rating feature so popular comments could be filtered to the top or highlighted green, similar to Reddit
What Was Done
After several design meetings, a rough sketch for a potential logo was finalized upon. From this sketch, I created the logo within Adobe Illustrator, so it would be easily re-used on printed materials and other products.
Starting with a base WordPress install, I evaluated several shopping cart solutions until I found one that I felt was the closest to the end solution we were seeking. Afterwords, I modified the shopping cart plugin to be able to provide printable coupons that would provide one unique barcode, to one customer, to one order (that way unique barcodes were not generated randomly each time it was printed and thus coupons could be printed that were not paid for).
WordPress, from its very foundation, is a blog posting platform and thus only minor changes were made to it for this site. A unique template was created to match the theme of the site and plugins for image galleries and comment rating were evaluated for the site.
Finally, the site required a custom page that was integrated with Twitter to display any tweets made with the hashtag #CarmodysCafe. This custom page used caching to limit the request to Twitter to every 5 minutes. Additionally, the page provided a way for visitors to post to their own twitter feed while being on the site.