Responsibilities: Development

Skills used: PHP, XML, XHTML/CSS, jQuery, Photoshop

Bed and Breakfast Nationwide is a directory of Bed and Breakfast accommodations available in the uk. Originally built in .NET it was decided to move to a more up to date platform to give the client the ability to update the content of the site through a web based interface.

The choice of WordPress came almost naturally to handle the cheer volume of bnbs and I decided to build a plugin to take care of the various backend functionalities and customisations needed.

The plugin handles custom attributes for posts and display them in a more user friendly maner, the map of the different regions and where they link to, the registered members only part of the blog and custom url rewrite for the category level.

http://www.bedandbreakfastnationwide.com/

The first part of the project involved importing the existing Access database to WordPress. The first solution I came up with was to create a xml file in the WordPress import format and have WordPress importing it. This worked brilliantly for normal posts and images but the meta data attached to each post could not be imported due the complexity of it.

My second attempt was successful and used the built in functions wp_create_category, wp_insert_post and add_post_meta.

Another interesting part of the project was to create the members only page. I developed a special template for the page and used a custom form and few tricks to get it work. You can view the code in this article:  The (almost) ultimate members page in WordPress.

I also did the implementation of the design created by one of my colleague and all the cosmetic work (javascript, maps, etc…).