Chartrite have a list of over 50,000 products that they wanted to put on their website and enable product searching. DunlopWeb specified how they thought the product search system should work and asked me to develop it. I reviewed the specification, suggested some changes and enhancements and decided to use a PHP MVC framework (Model View Controller) called Codeigniter to develop the software. You can see the new search system in action here.
Product search system for Chartrite developed using Codeigniter
This site is in fact an integration of WordPress and Codeigniter in the same website. The rest of the Website’s content is editable using WordPress as a CMS.
Here are some of the tasks I performed to develop the product search system:
- Setup a staging site with Codeigniter to use as a development platform
- Wrote and tested a system to import a CSV file which contains all the product data so that the database can be refreshed from thier office internal product database system
- Developed an admin interface so that they can login, do imports and edit the product data
- Added functionality so that they can add product images to the website
- Developed simple search and advanced search methods to meet with the required specification
- Conducted plenty of testing and then setup the new search system on their live website hosting
This was a very interesting project to work on and the client is pleased with the new product search functionality which is now live on thier website.