Zimma Web Development

It’s been a long time in the making but it’s finally all there. That is the all new Shambala Festival 2009 Website.

To quote the website, here’s a bit of background about Shambala Festival:

We see Shambala as a creative, non-commercial, ethical and family-friendly festival with a wild side. We have endeavoured to cultivate  a down-to-earth mix of creativity, the unexpected, a warm & friendly atmosphere, and quality entertainment.

As well as building the site and integrating the Zimma CMS system here are some of the other features we have developed for this project:

The Flickr / Spry photo gallery

Over the years, Shambalians have added their photos to the Shambala flickr groups and this makes up the Shambala photo gallery. You can select a year, photographer or highlight and the relevant photos will be pulled in from flickr.

Some of the galleries contain hundreds of photos and to make this more manageable we’ve integrated the Spry Ajax framework. Using this we could paginate the gallery results, add some neat transitions between gallery pages but best of all, hold off loading the full set of images and load each page as it is viewed saving on bandwidth and load times. Click here to see it in action.

The Shambala Community Forum

In the upcoming weeks to the big weekend people are getting excited and where to better to let it all out than the forum. For this we customised a vanilla forum which has done the job perfectly and in particular, it’s the simplicity that lots of people like. Here’s a comment from the forum

Well the fact that I got this far suggests its working OK. Hate it when theres too many pages to work through to get onto a forum site. So thanks for simplicity. Mike M

Ticketing white label

For buying tickets, we used TheTicketSellers white label functionality we had already built. Clicking through to buy tickets seamlessly takes you to TheTicketSellers but you wouldn’t know it. See the ticket page here.

Carbon offset calculator

Winners of the “Most sustainable event of 2008″ and the “Outstanding Green Award” last year, the festival is very conscious of it’s carbon footprint. This year they have introduced a carbon offset calculator that Zimma built and integrated into the buying process. A customer only needs to enter their postcode and it calculates an estimated amount of CO2 based on  their distance form the festival. You can read more about how they are using the money here: http://shambalafestival.org/about-us/sustainability/#offsetting-your-travel-explained

Zimma have also developed a crew ticket management system for the festival in conjunction with TheTicketSellers. More on that to come soon…

We’ve recently been working on a couple of projects that involve integrating hotel deals using the Laterooms affiliate program. This allows websites to offer hotel deals to their visitors and earn a slice of commission in the process.

TheTicketSellers

When an order is made on TheTicketSellers website the customer receives email confirmation and we spent some time rejigging this recently to provide the customer with more useful information. It seemed like the perfect place to include hotel listings as we know the customer is going to a particular event and we know where the event is so we can offer them deals on hotels near the event.

We ran into a couple of problems along the way.

The largest problem was that the XML feed provided by Laterooms that gives us all the latest prices can be unreliable. Expecting it to be available every time an order confirmation is sent would not be a good idea. So, we grab all the info early in the morning, store in a database and it can then be used throughout the rest of the day.

As we are relating the hotels to an event we needed to work out which hotels were close to the venue at which the event is being held. Whilst Laterooms provide the longitude and latitude of every hotel, we only have the postcode for the venue so a little bit of translation is needed to get a similar value for the hotel. We then use a long formula (essentially Pythagorean theorem adjusted to account for the curvature of the earth) to calculate the distances between the two points. This allows us to list all the hotels in order of how far they are from the venue.

Visit North West

Visit North West is a tourist information site for, you guessed it, the north west. Zimma recenlty helped them with their Laterooms hotel integrations so they had more flexibility and more efficient scripts.

Previously they were running off the Laterooms XML feed which meant page load times could be painful especially on pages that list hundreds of hotels.

Now, by using the database buffering technique used in TheTicketSellers example, it can serve the hotels without having to access the XML all the time or worry about whether the XML is available or not.

VNW also use their own hotel descriptions (as opposed to those provided by Laterooms) and combine this with information from the Laterooms CSV. Zimma set them up with a control panel that allows them to upload their own CSV files and Laterooms CSV files so they can serve information about the hotels from all three sources at once.

—

If you have a website which you think would benefit from listing tempting hotel deals and make money along the way then get in touch to see how we can help. We also offer restaurant and cinema listings integration services.