I had the chance to develop a very challenging system for one of our clients in Travel. Our goal was to provide a user interface that the site administrators can tap into, in order for our existing platform to “morph” into a custom site. This project was known as the ADS theme system.

My role was primary developer.

Our clients have different programs for their members. This program comes with their own company name, logo, branding as well as custom content. We had to present our existing websites in this identity – all dependent on their program id.

I had to create an admin panel for which the site administrators can enter their color scheme and upload their logos and such. The system was a standalone system that was not connected with the public facing site.

The result was a seamless system that is catered to their members. PHP code was used to run custom CSS dependent on the values that they have coming from the admin panel.

Hardly no images were used (except for the logos), gradients, shadows, buttons and text are all done through modern CSS3 techniques.

Zend Framework – a PHP based MVC system was used as the backend for both sites. MySQL is the database software for keeping the data as well as JavaScript for client and GUI interactions.

The project had allowed me to gain deeper understanding on custom content management systems. Additional experience in manipulating images working with the GD library, CURL for calling API’s as well as front end techniques.

Lastly, working in conjunction with other developers had forced me to learn tools for collaboration and agile development such as JIRA. I also learned more about versioning and code repository management through Subversion.