Easier.com is a consumer website offering product news, tips, advice and insight across auto, finance, lifestyle, property, technology and travel. In 2009 it was driven by a collection of Perl scripts, and had grown to hold tens of thousands of news articles. The original codebase had clearly been outgrown, and the client wanted to take it forward, enriching the content with linked data, better semantics and more room for advertising.
It was the largest project I led during my placement at Wired Media, rebuilding the whole site on Symfony with Doctrine, with Ben Lumley, our senior developer, as my guide.
I started by drawing up a new relational model for the site, which already held over fifty thousand articles. The client wanted to drop classifieds entirely, refocus on news and advertising, and reorganize the content so articles could sit in several categories, and categories could sit inside other categories as "aliases". I modelled that as a nested set, with Doctrine doing the heavy lifting.
With the traffic Easier's logs showed, the MySQL database had to be properly optimized, with Symfony's caching backed by memcached, partial and full page caching included. Search started out on Zend Lucene, which every other Symfony project on our books used, and was fine on test fixtures. Once I migrated the real data it clearly wasn't going to cope. I swapped it for Sphinx, which runs as its own process and keeps its index current with deltas. A full index rebuild went from over five hours to under eleven seconds.
Clean URLs and semantic, search engine friendly markup
Thumbnails generated with ImageMagick
Its own cloud server on Rackspace, as part of moving Wired Media's sites to the cloud, configured with Puppet
The admin
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References
Tom Beasley, Founder & MD of Wired Media
I worked with Steve for 4 years at Wired Media. I've always found Steve to be loyal, punctual, professional and commercially minded. His work is of a very high standard and Steve continually strived to learn and try new technologies. I found Steve to be a model employee and a pleasure to know and work with.
Steve is a highly skilled and conscientious developer with a great understanding of the web and the technologies that underpin it. He listens and takes time to understand (and occasionally question!) a client's needs and then reliably produces work of a high standard within agreed timeframes and budgets.
If you need a developer I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Steve.
