71Miles is a cool new travel site with a twist PM readers will find interesting — it’s built with WordPress. How? Adam Rugel writes “The nuts and bolts of our site is WordPress, it’s our foundation and content management system. We extended it to manage our content feeds: Google Calendar XML for the events calendar, map, and mobile product and Kayak’s brand new hotel API for the hotel deals. We tricked out the custom fields in WP to do a lot the work for us, and we’ve got the categories set up so that we can scale to roll out dozens of editions (NYC, LA, Chicago…). At any rate we’re loving the platform…” Definitely one of the coolest uses of the WordPress framework I’ve seen in a while.
I want a “Trick Out WordPress” session! It will redefine cool.
Thanks Matt! Adam Weller, our developer, deserves all the credit.
Yeah, hats off to them. I like some of the things they are doing.
That is a neat site – and WordPress to!
How did they do that events listing and use Google Calender?
Karl
Ah, so WordPress is a framework now? 😉
Yeah, I want to know how they did the Google Calendar feed too….I’ve been fighting with something similar on a WP site of mine…
Is there any way you could get Mr. Weller to talk about how they designed their categories for that kind of scalability? I’m in the planning stages of a site with the same concept of scalability (planning an eventual localized rollout in multiple locales) and I’m always interested to see how other people are approaching this type of issue.
Wow, I’m really impressed with what you’ve been able to do. I assume you’re using WordPress to do almost all, if not all, of it.
A link to this site came with my installation of WordPress. I’m not really sure why, but I thought it’d be cool to at least check out your page.
Mine is still in its infant stages… check it out if you like: Mindwaves at http://bagwellfamily.net/noelsblog/
Hey guys, thanks for the kind words. I’m sure we’ll post some docs as soon as we have some time but if you want to send me some specific questions regarding rendering data from Google Calendar feeds on your site, feel free…
>> How did they do that events listing and use Google Calender?
From their website: “The 71Miles events and map points all comes from parsing Google Calendar feeds using MagpieRSS, the Zend Framework and the Dojo Toolkit.”
I’d like to get to know more about their implementation …
Some of the implementation has changed as I’m now caching data locally (in mysql for faster page load times) but in a nutshell, for interacting w/the Google Calendar, we are
– writing events via the Zend Google Data Client Library (although this code is new and most of our current data was inputted manually by Adam in the Google Calendar UI, which is why we used it as its a great app :))
– reading events via the public rss2 feeds (that can be enabled for any google calendar).
The Dojo toolkit is then used to fetch the map data on user click. All data for the map points, hotel deals, calendar events is stored as events on various Google Calendars (each destination typically then has three Calendars associated w/it; ‘Map Points’, ‘Hotel Deals’ and ‘Calendar Events’).
Like I mentioned in my first comment, our plan is to provide full documentation soon but would like to get our next revision completed before doing so. Tentative plans are to also release the code as a WordPress plugin (which I guess wouldn’t be too useful for anyone other than an easy way to view the source).
Hope that helps a bit, stay tuned and thanks…
There are other sites, that are built on top of WordPress, using it as a framework. One such site is Truemors.com, but do you know any other sites, which use WordPress in an innovative way (breaking away from the blog/cms paradigm) ?