Digital Butter

The Wine Guide - launched

Prior to booking our flights to Dallas, we spent the better part of the last 2 months building out a fairly large scale portal using MODx Revolution. As part of our process, we took to learning all that Revolution has to offer - in particular having fun with extJs, xPDO and lexicons.

This global portal features a unique B2C and B2B concept.  The site allows wine-o’s the opportunity to interact with the site by leaving tasting notes and rating wines, it also features a B2B component that allows events to be posted and perhaps most functional, it allows retailers to upload their entire inventory database. 

The site is still technically in beta and will continued to be worked on - the database is still in the early early stages. For all the wine-o’s out there, hopefully you’ll find some use out of this site and contribute to the ever growing database =)

A couple of links:

• Home: http://the-wine-guide.com/
• A Wine, with global Inventory: http://the-wine-guide.com/wine-detail-page.html?&wine=2593&retailers=worldwide#inventory_list

For the techies (& without giving up anything confidential) - here’s a couple of snaps from the backend, pretty much all the wine database content is managed via custom built 3PC’s making heavy use out of MODext and xPDO.

List of Components for wine/event/venue/promotion management:

The ‘Wine Manager’ 3PC. MODext being used for data listing as well as filtering. Really realised the power of MODext and the datagrids in particular here.

Quick editing a wine - just double click on a cell in the datagrid:

Handling inventory - data entry is done via CSV file upload. Wine merchants will be supplying their inventory in pre-templated Excel sheets. Using this component, not only does wine inventory get uploaded, unrecognised wines are inserted into the database. This database is going to get very big very quickly.

Lastly, this whole system is built in 3 languages. The inbuilt lexicon management tool did the trick pretty nicely =)

Come find us if you’re at the MODxPO or leave us your thoughts and comments.  

EDIT: Forgot to mention that we heavily heavily used FormIt for the user input modules on this site. That snippet is incredible, thanks to Shaun McCormick for developing something so robust and well thought out.