The new design needed to be similar to the design for the client’s other website Horse Sport Ireland. It also needed to be responsive to address the growing number of mobile and tablet users.
Primarily a membership site, we needed to make it easy for sellers to buy subscription pack and to post adverts.
To support the administrative side of the site, the client required bespoke workflows and notifications, for example capturing if a horse had been sold through the website or externally.
A whole series of reports were required including number of adverts, advert expiry, membership expiry, number of active sellers which ClassiPress did not provide natively.
Capturing data from the front-end on how potential buyers interact with the ads was also an objective.
We had extensive road mapping sessions with various client employees to understand the processes, issues and requirements they needed in their particular roles.
There are a lot of components to this website and there wasn’t the budget to build a bespoke system from the ground up.
We decided to heavily customise the existing child theme and move as much of the additional functionality as we could into plugins.
ClassiPress doesn’t offer a huge range of hooks and filters, so we ended up overriding a lot of the theme templates, inserting our own.
Data gathered from active members, memberships, ads and sells and made accessible to our reporting plugin, delivering a reports dashboard.
Scheduled tasks send out notifications to administrators and to sellers when ads and membership packs are coming up for renewal.
We added and monitored front-end events such as seller phone number reveals, sending event data to Google Analytics.
The reporting requirements was a significant portion of this job. Out of the box, ClassiPress doesn’t track any data on ads marked as sold or the number of active sellers, so this data had to be mined but in a way that didn’t degrade the performance of the site.
Data points were stored in transients and cached for just the right amount of time to produce a workable data set for the throughput of the website – ads, new registrations, membership pack purchases & renewals etc.
Once this data was available we were able to create a reporting plugin which minded the data to product reports for the site administrators.
Data is represented visually in charts and graphs using the chart.js open source library and is exportable as a CSV download for easy import into inbound marketing lists using MailChimp.