Creativepool.com - site rebuild and v3 launch
- Project
- site rebuild and v3 launch (August 2013)
- Client
- Creativepool
- My role
- technical architect, lead developer, database administrator
- Website
- creativepool.com
The UK's largest directory of creative professionals. In 2010 I inherited this project with a heavy legacy codebase spanning many years of far-from-perfect development (by which I mean it kept randomly crashing a few times a day). I acted as technical architect in a freelance capacity, and lead developer of the main website.
After fixing the urgent issues, I gradually moved all sections over to a code library of my own, writing a ton of custom object-oriented code in PHP to provide scheduled functionality, utilise 3rd party APIs, e-payments, email campaigns, and statistics. Creativepool was relaunched as Version 3 in 2013, changing metal in the process to a much more recent hardware. I'm proud of its stability.
Features
- 150,000+ users
- Object-oriented PHP 5.3
- Replaced legacy PHP 5.1 codebase.
- Own framework (Underscore v1 ORM)
- Bespoke content management system
- jQuery for frontend interactivity and async content
- E-payments by Netbanx
- Broadbean-style API
- Social networking features
- Redis caching layer
- Background workers in PHP
- Text extraction & indexing of pdf, doc, docx, rtf CVs.
- Antivirus scanning via clamav.
- Sphinx search
- Cron-based server maintenance
- push to stage and live via rsync
- versioned in SVN
- project-managed in Mantis
-
documented in MediaWiki
- Activity stream system by Lee Briggs.
- Frontend by Matthew Bell
- Site UI/UX designed in house at Creativepool
Tool summary
PHP MySQL Apache RHEL, Redis, Sphinx; jQuery, ajax+json, XML & Broadbean REST;
CLI: svn, rsync; ghostscript, antiword, clamscan, mplayer, pdftotext, swfrender, unrtf, openssl