My Full English – A new beginning

Making the leap into a complete rewrite can be a difficult one. If you can afford the time it takes and the pros out way the cons then go for it. I’ve been busy working on the latest version of my full English. In my next few blog posts I’m going to go through the process I went through from conception to delivery.

The latest version of MFE3 is now available. Although nothing special to look at, it does at least allow the same functionality on mobile as it does on desktop devices. Just writing the previous sentence justifies to me all the work I’ve put in to completely re-writing the previous version.

So what was wrong with the previous version?

As a developer, you build things with the knowledge you have at the time. When we kicked off version 2, a fully functioning site on mobile was only really ever a side thought. The site was built on a custom framework I had built from scratch which I called Mastersolution. Despite the cool name, the framework was very unloved. It was basically a bespoke MVC framework using Smarty as the template engine. When we completed the desktop version we thought ‘oh we had better do a mobile version’. A quick redirect with device detection took you to the ‘mobile’ version. All you could do is find venues near you and get directions to those venues. The functionality to add new venues and reviews just wasn’t available? This sucked.

So what did the new version have to do?

I set out clear goals and objectives with the new version of my full English.

1. I would use the new version as a vehicle to learn as many new technologies as possible
2. I would concentrate on MFE until I have at least 100 reviews added (hopefully not just by me although 100 full English breakfasts do sound tempting)
3. The same functionality should exist on the desktop and mobile versions of the site

What were the initial decisions?

Framework

I decided that it was time to move with the times and move to either Zend 2 or Symphony. A similar debate was happening at work at the time. And Zend 2 was decided as the way to go.

Responsiveness

I had decided that Twitter bootstrap was the best way to go. I had used it before, and as a ‘backend’ guy I loved how easy it was to make things look nice.

What next?

So I was all set for my journey into the unknown. See how I get on in the next blog piece!