For the past 6 months or so, we’ve been busily working away at the new Soil Quality website. We’ve been working with Dan Murphy et al at UWA, and have partnered with a long list of organisations to bring you the site (go and have a look at the site and check out all the associated parties … there’s a lot!).

We’ve been working with the fine collection of people at Consuming Passions for 6 years now on both the Tasting Australia and World Food Media Awards websites. And now we’ve just launched the fourth version of the site.

With a new sponsor this year, the 2007 Le Cordon Bleu World Food Media Awards recognises the best writers, television programmes, books, websites … anything to do with media and food really. People have been able to download the entry forms and nominee lists on previous versions of the site, but this year we’ve pulled out all the stops, with an online entry form.

In the last post, we alluded to the fact that we’ve been pretty busy, but didn’t really tell you much of what we’ve been doing. That wasn’t out of any deep need for secrecy or anything, just that we had other stuff to write about.

So what’s been going on? What’s been keeping the midnight oil suppliers in business? Well …

5 Senses

There’s a new site for 5 Senses on the way. Not much is going to change in the way of the design, but the entire backend is completely different. Re-written in RubyOnRails (natch), the site is much more flexible, with 5 Senses being able to edit more of the site than before. We’ve also tweaked the checkout process, to make it easier to use.

We’re in the process of switching Payment Gateways as well, this time going with eWay. We did some work on adding the gateway into the ActiveMerchant plugin, which makes credit card authorisation a snap.

Ampac

Ampac is one of our long-term clients. We started work with them back in 2000 or so, and over time the site has grown and grown. One of the problems with the old site is that it is just static HTML pages, which means management nightmare. The opportunity has never arisen to make any changes to it. Luckily, a few months ago, that situation changed, and we started work on a new site.

Totally new design, database backend, utilising the Globalize Rails plugin to handle multiple worldwide offices with the minimum of fuss for the client.

We’re just adding the final tweaks now, so look for this within a week or two.

World Food Media Awards

Another long-term client, we’ve done 3 versions of the World Food Media Awards website since 2001. This time, we’re adding the ability to do online entries, which will reduce the amount of time and effort needed to process the entries (a totally manual process prior to now).

Getting ready to launch on Friday!

Easyrider Tours

Backpackers and travellers have had the ability to make booking requests for almost a year now, but they’ve had no ability to pay for them online. The range of options when making a booking is almost insane, and has made adding live bookings quite difficult. However, we think we’ve finally cracked the nut, and this is only a week or two away.

Abi and Joseph

The Abi and Joseph range has been online for over one year, along with an email form to make a purchase, but we’re just adding the final touches at the moment to turn on live credit card purchasing.

Optika

A new client, this site is starting out as a relatively basic brochure site, but there’s big plans afoot for it to become the main control panel for contractors hired by Optika. We’ve got this site ready, but we’re just waiting for some final content from the fine people at Optika before we can go live.

2Inspire

2Inspire are another new client (recommended by those funny fellows at The Globe) who are just starting on their road to world domination … um, helping their fellow men and women and children. Or more particularly children. They are offering “Life Coaching” services to schools and youth organisations, to help them with whatever they need help with.

The Globe have done some delicious work on the design, and once again, we’re ever so close to going live.

You’d never believe it, but that’s just a small sampling of what we’ve been up to recently. Ever so busy, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Fun times ahead.

A few months ago, we wrote about the love we have for Campaign Monitor. We love using it, and we’ve integrated it into several projects that we’ve worked on recently (including one we’ll tell you about next week).

One of the main reasons that we act like giddy schoolgirls around Campaign Monitor is the fact that they have a wonderful API. (An API is an interface that lets developers access features of a website from within their own code … it’s cool. Trust us!) Being the nice fellows that they are, they also included sample code that lets you easily access their API, if you are developing in ASP.Net or PHP. Of course, that left us RubyOnRails junkies out on the street, cold turkey style.

Not any more! It makes us immeasurably proud to announce the release of our first open source project: CampaignMonitor

A short while ago we launched Abi & Joseph to little fanfare. Abi White was launching her new Pilates and Exercise Casualwear Clothing company and was understandably focussed on finalising the product range, the marketing material and actually getting her product into stores. We worked on a basic website to highlight the range of products and to provide contact information.

Now, with a successful product launch behind them, we are proud to announce the addition of several features to the site, the most important being the online ordering facility. You can now browse the catalog of clothing, and choose from a frankly astonishingly large range of fabrics, sizes and colours.

The other day I did an interview with Rodney Gedda about RubyOnRails. The resulting article was just published in the online edition. All very exciting we think.

The article mentions the SchoolSeek site, that we are currently rewriting in RubyOnRails, and I just thought I would expand on some of the points that are touched on in the article.

The other day we were reading Seth Godin’s blog and there was an entry called Stuck Systems about how an online bibliography creator that allowed people to easily create and share bibliographies didn’t exist. So, we built one – Biblio.

It’s still very limited in it’s functionality (sharing bibliographies isn’t available yet), but it’s here, and it’s going to improve. We use Amazon Web Services to do the searching, and the wonderful Ruby/Amazon library, that makes it all dead simple to do.

Oh, and of course it’s built on RubyOnRails.

Let us know what you think.

We just spent a busy weekend finalising the Calendar of Events for Tasting Australia. Go and have a look, we think it’s rather good, and you’ll be able to plan what you want to do when you go to Adelaide this October. You did say you were going didn’t you?

A bit of a technical aside: We used RubyOnRails, and it’s magnificent AJAX handlers to create the interactive calendar. It’s got all sorts of funky fades and toggles going on.

We’ve broken out the bubbly, and are snacking on the caviar, because we’ve just launched our first intranet built with RubyOnRails. What’s an intranet you ask? What’s RubyOnRails?

Remembering that this is ostensibly a post to tell you about the work we’ve been doing for Five Senses, I’ll just give you a quick primer. An intranet is essentially a way for you to store and use company information via a web browser. And RubyOnRails, which we mentioned a while back is a web development framework that makes our job easier than some of the tools we were using in the past. And as we all know, when things are easier for the developer, that means less time which, happily for all (except our bank manager) means less money!

Are you an Allied Health Professional with a burning desire to move to Australia and New Zealand? If so, how are you going to get a job when you get here? By going to Global Health Source of course.

The fine people at Global Health Source will take all your info, feed it into their large brains and database and come up with the perfect position for you. They will. Trust me.

And on a technological note, this is the second site that we have done using the increasingly spectacular Ruby On Rails. We’ve talked about Rails before, but the more we use it, the more we sit in awe of it.

And what was the first site we did with Ruby? Hang tight. That’s coming soon.

There are two things we’d like to tell you!

1. We’re working on a project we’d like to tell you about, but can’t. Secrecy and all!
2. We’re using the whizz-bang, funkolicious new development platform Ruby on Rails to do it!

While we admit we’re a bit of a tease for telling you about something that we can’t actually tell you about, we are pretty damn psyched to let you know that we’re doing it on Rails! I realise that it won’t really matter to a lot of you, and those of you that it might mean something to probably haven’t even heard of it, but trust us, it’s cool.

Ruby on Rails is a development platform for creating websites and web applications that allows developers to get on with creating the website, rather than spending phenomenal amounts of time on the low end plumbing for a website. And what does that mean for you, the customer? Faster projects which equals cheaper projects! So we all win.

Spin has been contracted by Five Senses Coffee, an existing client who make the best damn coffee in the whole world, to develop a whizz bang intranet. What will this intranet do, specifically? Well, that’s really the first part of the project, but we can give you a rough idea.

The intranet will be used to manage all of their clients, the orders, the packaging required, information about the clients. There might even be an area for clients to go and place their orders directly. And of course a mighty, super powerful, all seeing and all conquering search engine that will let the wonderful staff find out anything that’s been entered anywhere in the system!

Nice. Coming soon to a coffee roaster near you.