New Portfolio Item
Published November 30, 2003
I have posted a new project to my Portfolio, the website TicketsInTime.com. I thought I would do a little write-up on the project.
The idea of the site was to take a CSV file provided by a ticket-vendor and automatically generate pages for each event as well as category pages to group events together. It was also necessary to allow customization of specific events and to be able to add related pages to events, such as a tour schedule, bios, etc.
To accomplish these goals, I wrote a custom CMS using PHP/MySQL. An administrator can then feed in the CSV file, modify content as desired, and then do a rebuild, similar to how Movable-Type works. The CMS then feeds a sequence of Smarty templates to generate the pages.
For the front end, I designed XHTML/CSS/JavaScript compliant templates. The logo and event image design were done by others. Some of the more tricky techniques used include CSS Image replacement for the header, a mix of absolute and relative positioning to place content before the menu and header as well as to center the page, and a special JavaScript to adjust the height of the menu to match the height of the content box.
cool... but I have never heard of TicketsInTime. And nowhere on the website could I find a link about the company, who they are, where they are based, are they related to Ticketmaster or any other such, etc. I wouldn't feel comfortable dropping $170 for a concert seat in a remote city without knowing who my broker is...
now, back to the site... if you are using a csv to feed the site, why do you need MySQL? That part wasn't clear to me.
Good to see you use templates. I wasn't sure if Smarty still existed, nice to know it does. I use HTML::Template and life has never been better.
P Kishor on December 1, 2003 #They are associated with Event Inventory http://www.eventinventory.com They are also brand new, which is why you may not be able to find information about them. They did not exists in any form before this site.
As for using MySQL, the administrators needed to be able to add/modify information for some events. So while it would be possible to modify the CSV file accordingly, it seemed kind of silly to do it that way.
Sean Kelly on December 1, 2003 #