Yesterday we launched the website for Ticket+Travel. This is the highlight of a few months of hard work. It is actually a relaunch of the Mambo website we created over three years ago, completely redone using the Nooku Framework.
The site is a selling point for Dutch and German auto- and motorsport fans who want to attend one of these races. The website provides tickets and travel arrangements. This includes just the hotel booking, flights and hotels with tranfers to the circuit, and even complete F1 Holidaytrips® and hospitality trips.
When I heard about the Nooku Framework a few months ago, I knew this would be a very powerfull framework to create extensions for Joomla. A lot of standard coding is taken care of by the framework and is not needed anymore in the extension itself. At that point I was already creating my own abstract classes for repetative work, but knowing the skills of Johan Janssens and Mathias Verraes from JoomlaTools I knew they could do this much better. After all Johan is the architect of the Joomla 1.5 MVC framework.
The old website was a combination of Mambo, phpShop (which became VirtueMart for Joomla), some mambots and a lot of customisation. It worked great, improving the online sales from 30% to about 90% instead of ordering by e-mail and fax.
But the maintenance was high, so it wat time to upgrade the site and come up with a much better back-end interface. This has now been accomplished as a custom component created with the Nooku Framework. The main component uses 15 model classes, 16 controllers, 13 back-end views and 12 front-end views.
Compared to using the normal Joomla MVC framework it took about the same time to develop. Mainly because in the start of the project there was much to find out about Nooku. There was almost no documentation and only a few examples. And on top of that I was working with an early v0.7 release. It was stable enough to use, but after each SVN update I had to redo some of my code to keep in line with the changes. It paid of in the end, because finishing a project like this always takes a lot of effort but not this time. Having gained a lot of experience along the way made it easy to finish this one.
So the time it took was about the same, but for a next project it will be faster. But there was another gain, the code is so much cleaner now. It was easier to see which parts of the code needed refactoring along the way. This makes it easier to maintain and a safer component in the end.
If you are interested in going to a Formula 1 event, DTM, A1GP, MotoGP, Superbike or IndyCar make sure to buy your tickets at Ticket+Travel. If you are interested in getting a custom component yourself, contact us.
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