Examples of Our Work

• National Food Hygiene Ratings Website (Scores on the Doors).
• Anorak.
• Lease Desk.
• Authentic Holidays.
• Mobile E-commerce Application.
• Mobile Ringtones Application.
• CMS Integration (Contact a Family).
• Event Management System (Glasgows).
• Data Warehousing (PDSA).

National Food Hygiene Ratings Website

Scores On The Doors is a national public information service from which you can find the official local authority hygiene ratings for food businesses. In addition to the public side of the site, the application provides numerous “behind the scenes” functions – such as reporting, certificate generation, RSS feeds and a SOAP or JSON API for external entities to consume / use data from the site.

We “inherited” the code base from the previous development company, and have provided telephone support, ongoing maintenance and implementation of new features as required.

As a brief summary, we have :

• Added RSS feeds, allowing an end user to be notified of new inspections within an authority’s area.
• Enhanced the reporting facilities for clients
• Refactored the backend database to improve performance, scalability and data integrity.
• Provide search suggestions to end users to help discover businesses.
• Developed an API for use by the mobile applications
• iPhone application development.
• Android application development.
• Security improvements.
• Search engine optimisations (SEO).
• Performance optimisations (page caching, database query optimisation, memcached)
• Automated unit tests (PHPUnit, Selenium) and Continuous Integration (Jenkins) to enhance quality, support maintenance and reduce regressions or old defects re-appearing
• Re-structuring of the code base to improve future development speed
• Load adaptive – helping the site cope during sudden traffic spikes (like being mentioned on TV’s The Food Inspectors) while also offering the best experience possible to users.

We have made use of the following technology: PHP5.2/5.3, Zend Framework, Jenkins, PHPUnit, Smarty, Propel, MySQL, SOAP, Google Maps, Objective C, Java, Javascript/ECMAScript (primarily jQuery)

Anorak

Anorak is a relatively high traffic ‘news’ website, with around 500,000 page hits per day, served from a single server.

Due to the nature of the site, it frequently experiences load spikes as new stories are posted.

The site is based on WordPress Content management and Publishing Platform.

We’ve provided :

• Integration with Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Buzz etc.).
• Systems administration (backups, monitoring, performance tuning for MySQL and Apache).
• WordPress optimisations and performance improvements (memcache, Apache optimisations, PHP code optimisations).
• WordPress maintenance and support.
• Custom WordPress integration
• Bespoke PHP and Javascript development

Lease-Desk

We created and maintain a Leasing Portfolio Management solution which is designed specifically to generate sales and improve the management of agreements between a leasing company and it’s customers.

This project is written entirely in the Zend Framework, and includes a powerful, responsive user interface and extensive reporting capabilities with in-line bar charts, pie charts and PDF generation.

The application has an extensive permissions hierarchy, and makes use of remote web services (eg. Credit Safe). It can also work alongside existing platforms using (for example) Microsoft SQL Server.

• Thorough unit test coverage and continuous integration via Jenkins.
• PHP 5.3+
• Integration with remote APIs (SalesForce.com, SOAP)
• Zend Framework.
• MySQL.

Authentic Holidays

Authentic Holidays provide holiday apartment and property rental in Italy, France and the UK. We inherited the code base from the existing developer, and we have:

• Performed extensive re-factoring of the code base to enhance robustness.
• Increased code reuse.
• Enhanced search engine optimisation (SEO).
• Integrated third party affiliates with the site (REST/XML-RPC API integration) to provide a larger selection of properties.
• Migrated sites to a dedicated server to enhance performance and site robustness.

Mobile E-commerce Application

Working as an additional development team for a popular mobile content company, Pale Purple produced a mobile web site for the selection and downloading of mobile content such as ringtones, wallpapers and games.

Technologies used:

• PHP5.
• Zend Framework.
• MySQL.

Mobile Ringtones Application

Working as an outsourced development team, Pale Purple produced ringtones e-commerce mobile site (i.e. browsing, purchasing, downloading and associated administrative back-end). This project made heavy use of the Zend Framework and technologies like memcached.

Technologies used:

• PHP5.
• Zend Framework.
• Memcached.
• MySQL.

CMS Integration (Contact a Family)

This project for Contact a Family involved creation of a directory site to store details on conditions. This involved creation of custom CMS module to fit in with the existing web architecture. The solution allows Contact A Family to publish condition overviews to the public, and maintain an authoritative directory for subscribers where outside experts can be assigned to particular conditions and be responsible for content review. Each condition consists of multiple pages with integrated forums and feedback forms.

Technologies used:

• PHP5,
• ExponentCMS,
• Javascript/ECMAScript,
• CSS.

Event Management System (Glasgows)

Glasgows is one of the UK’s largest in-house suppliers of conference & event services. Based in Preston, they organise and run a number of high profile events.

In March 2006 Pale Purple were recommended, via an existing customer, to Glasgows.

Glasgows required the capability for delegates to register for events securely online. They also wished to replace their ageing thick-client internal application which was causing extensive management and maintenance issues.

Glasgows were able to provide some development capability in house — mainly limited to HTML and CSS — but lacked experience in developing large PHP based applications. They had already worked on a requirements specification with appropriate mock screen-shots, and had a first draft of a database structure which they felt would encapsulate the necessary data across all events.

Working in association with Glasgows, Pale Purple produced an initial prototype and then progressed into producing the actual application. Working on a flexible, hours-spent basis combined with regular meetings and communication, the application went live in October 2007.

Glasgows decided on the flexible development approach as it allowed for them to change requirements as the project progressed, with minor overhead. To date it has handled approximately 50,000 delegates.

PDSA Data Warehousing

Pale Purple worked with the PDSA to produce a data consolidation system allowing for easy interrogation of data from the various distributed silo-ed databases at each pet hospital. To date the system has currently been running for over four years.

Technologies used:

• Python,
• PHP,
• Perl,
• Smarty,
• MySQL