So a year on from starting at IE, what’s news? Besides spring and the joy of hayfever again, I thought I’d give a run down on what’s been keeping me busy.
Hoyts.com.au and hoyts.co.nz; the website for the cinema chain that operates here and in NZ is both a business and technical challenge on many levels. Dealing with external vendors, multiple stakeholders and a codebase that was far from Sitecore best practice has been a learning experience. In the year since we’ve managed to put live a home page redesign, regular maintenance updates and bug fixes, and most importantly; the new rewards program which is going strong.
Hoyts Corporate Australia and New Zealand; architecturally what should have been a fairly straight-forward exercise to create a ‘microsite’ running off a main site presented it’s own challenges when working around some publishing booby traps left by the previous developers. Also learnt some lessons about working with a multi-site Sitecore installation.
Hoyts Mobile Australia and New Zealand; a couple of brand new Hoyts websites, no Sitecore integration. Designed to replace an older WAP mobile site, the new mobile website incorporates some of the latest HTML5 and CSS3 techniques to streamline front-end development. Server side, it was awesome to work with MVC2, not having done any MVC development for a while, it took a while to get used to again.
Other stuff about mobile development and this site:
- MVC2 custom validation is cool
- Testing against a gazillion different mobile browsers is NOT cool ;)
- Being one of the first to trial Paypal’s Mobile Express Checkout has its drawbacks.
- Incorporating Google Mobile Analytics, still in ‘Labs’
Maxxia NZ; just to make sure Sitecore isn’t the only CMS I work on, I did Level 1 and 2 Umbraco certification. Just in time to build the Maxxia NZ website. Nothing notable about the site itself, from the point of view of CMS’s though, it’s refreshing to work with a different CMS and one that really is bare-bones compared to Sitecore. Highly recommended for small/mid-level organisations looking for a .Net CMS, or for anyone not looking to pay for Sitecore’s full feature set.
IE Website; much to the amusement of the other .Net developers, I also put my hand up to play with WordPress. I’m not sure I’d call myself a WordPress guru, but I did get to play with a couple of cool new features of WordPress; custom post types and taxonomies.
Along the way, I’ve also learnt a hell of a lot more about front-end development than I expected. I’d even say I know my way around Photoshop and creating non-table layouts in CSS… it’s only taken me a few years to catch up to everyone else on this.
Finally, I couldn’t finish this post without giving a shout out to all the peeps at IE. They’re pretty sweet ;)
Special kudos to the .Net team there, the dorks… and Mig’s mum. She’s super sweet. ;)
