I’ve been working at Boatshop24 since January 2010 as a PHP web developer. When I started, the flagship website was based upon an outdated sprawling hotch-potch of a code-base – that is to say hundreds of PHP includes called from various places, display markup (mostly table cells at that) intertwined with business logic (?!) etc etc.
Following on from Practical Boating, and as an aside from my day-to-day PHP development, I’ve been working on another WordPress project: Brighton & Hove Free Press. The idea was to have a site that contains news items written by the people for the people primarily living and working in Brighton and Hove area.
During January/February I worked at BoatShop24 developing a Wordpress hub site for PracticalBoating.com. The aim was to integrate the existing vBulletin forums with a new Wordpress blog framework. The final Wordpress theme involved the development of several Wordpress page templates and plugins.
This project was a major ongoing task at the ADS during 2009. My goal was to bring together our disparate set of web resources and systems into a fresh modern enterprise SOA architecture.
In collaboration with the Natural Language Processing Research Group at the University of Sheffield, Archaeotools has been an ambitious research and development project that has given me an opportunity to explore data mining, faceted classification and E-archaeology.
We initially released this website last August. However, I’ve since been updating various sections and developing a back-office suite that will be launched over the coming months.