Upgrade tonight

I'm ready to upgrade vendor search page. This should speed up searches as well as squash a few bugs that have been lingering. I've been working with the Smarty templating engine a little bit more and now I have completely separated out my business logic. If all goes well I will be working on the next feature which should be coming fairly soon. Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope for a smooth update.

A techie blog and a news blog

It's amazing all the stuff that goes into developing websites. Development can often seem snail paced slow the average user. People often do not want to know what pains a developer goes through to build a website. All a user cares about is .. well using the website. There is nothing wrong with this of course.

What I'm getting at is this. I created the bridal vine wordpress blog a while back and try to make regular updates as to the status of there website. I use do my best to reduce the geek speak and speak directly to my users needs.

I've decided to keep the wordpress blog exactly the same asit has been. I will update users of new features and changes to the site. I will post press releases and release news about as well.

What I would like to do is convert this blog to give more nuts and bolts type of stuff from a developers perspective. Since I love talking tech, it will allow me to chronicle some of the more techie stuff about the site. For example I could talk about how I am moving towards an MVC structure and spent most of the weekend rebuilding the vendor page stripping out the "view" and working them into smarty templates. I can also talk about the numerous restructures and re-factoring that goes on the daily. I can speak to fun stuff like that.

Hopefully, one or two people might actually find this stuff interesting, but of course I assume most users would not really be into this type of information; hence the two blog idea.

A tech blog and a news blog.

By the way here is a link to the new wordpress blog in case you want to check it out. http://www.thebridalvine.com/blog.

I plan on better linking it in the future. Until next time..

10 Ways to Look Your Best At Weddings

Check out another amazing article on The Bridal Vine: "10 Ways to Look Your Best At Weddings" by Kristin Griffin Photography http://thebridalvine.com/newsvine.php?articleid=1020 #weddingplanning #weddings

We finally got ourselves a new blog. You can find it here: http://www.thebridalvine.com/blog

This blog will now self destruct..

Build the new look of the site

Another productive few days. I have been continuing the front end development on The Bridal Vine by integrating the old code into the new css templates. The new vendor search feature is the next step. This is part is not so easy because it involves new code. Not too much but just enough to give me a little speed bump. Some code needs to be stripped out completely and be re-written. So far so good though. Once I get the new search functionality working, the rest of the site should be a breeze to convert.

Do you know featured vendors can change their "scope?"

Today was a beautiful day in New Jersey and I had some time to fix and clean up some code on the site. Did you know that featured vendors can expand their servicing area outside of their local sub-region? This newly implanted feature is called scope.

Your scope is the service area you cover. Currently we have 4 settings: local, statewide, country wide, and world wide. You can find this handy setting right in the vendor lounge after you log into your account.

Please test this out!!

I have been trying to clean up some of my spaghetti code for months now. I have been wrapping code in reusable classes, replacing old 1.0 code with jquery, as well as other geeky stuff I won't bore you too much with.

One big change that will have to go through will be the some data in the mySQL database. To alleviate my own confusion down the road I will be changing the names of the servicing areas (changing states to regions and regions to sub-regions). Two small changes can affect the entire website functionality so I need to tread cautiously or I will be in for a long week.

Anyway enough of the boring geekspeak. Here are some recent changes:

• New feature to change scope should be working
• New slick jquery regional option boxes on the register and edit pages
• Lost password recovery system
• Check for duplicate emails in the database
  

More changes to come!

New feature: Expanded service areas

Today I did some work on adding the ability to change the scope a vendors servicing area. This basically means that featured vendors can now change where their listings show up. If you do business in all of New Jersey, you can have your listing seen in all of New Jersey. Do business worldwide? You've guess it. This setting can be found after logging into the vendors lounge. This feature is available to featured accounts only and yes it's beta beta beta. Please report any bugs on our bug forum. Enjoy!