The DNS has migrated and the new code is online. The new version of Michael Owen Online has gone up with almost no problems. The only issues that were seen were 2 HTML files Google Webmaster tools looks for to prove you own the website, and a collection of wordpress URLs which were not identified and 301′d when the new code went up. As re-launch issues go they were pretty minor.So how about a little information about how the new website works.
The new site has been written with the Symfony 1.4 PHP framework and uses Doctrine 1.2 to communicate with the database. There are 2 databases in use, 1 is the old wordress database which continues to power a large chunk of the site. The other database stores the content for the new code, and some code which is still in development. The biggest of which is a Gallery Solution based upon some code I built a few years ago for Pure FM (Portsmouth Student Radio) but this will not be finished for a few weeks.
The site also pulls from 2 RSS feeds. These are:
- The site forums – which is used to display the 2 most recently updated posts on the home page and community page.
- The YouTube Channel (via the YouTube API) – which is used to display the 4 most recent video uploads on the home page and most recent 8 on the video’s page.
From a social media point of view it was decided that comments could be implemented and managed via the Facebook Social plugins since the request was made to add facebook like to the news items. As a result all news items have Facebook Like and Comments on the bottom of the post to allow for facebook users to interact with the content. This also allowed for the home page to have the Facebook activity widget added to it to highligh to new site users which pages on the site have had the most recent social interactions on them.
