Price Tapestry
I'm currently working on a price comparison website. There is no way I was going to even attempt to code the inner working of a price comparison site myself, so enter Price Tapestry. Basically everything is there for me. All I have to do is design the site, sort out multiple layouts, stylise all the bits of information that get pulled in from feeds and add a CMS. Easy right? Well, it's not as easy as I thought it would be.
The site design is easy enough and I'm happy with it. Everything looks beautiful. When it comes to styling sections, things start to get a bit more difficult as there are PHP snippets all over the place that do all kinds of helpful things all with different ids and classes. Common sections that you'd expect to see on a price comparison site. So I've spent some time going through all the snippets of code, seeing what pulls up where and when, how this fits into the site etc, and that's where it starts to get a bit tough.
The first thing I looked at doing was removing the tables that hold the price comparison information. My initial thoughts were that, although this is information is table worthy, the site could be a lot more fluid if it made use of a <div> tag or two instead. I started with removing the table to see how the information was presented before adding anything else to replace it, and this caused the code to break. The problem was that the code calling in the snippet requires tables and that is calling in information from elsewhere. So all the information has to be held in tables. Okay, not too much of a problem as most of the data can be classed as table data.
Implementing a CMS
Implementing a CMS is where a real problem occurs and so I have spent some time working out how to get around this. The problem with Price Tapestry code is that it doesn't mix well with a CMS. If you store some Price Tapestry PHP code in a database and try and call it, you get nothing. This is obviously a problem, as when I first looked at it, what I wanted to do was call up parts of code within pages managed by the CMS so that page content can be edited easily. There is one work around which I decided straight away that I wouldn't use. It'd work with a CMS, but you become slightly limited to what you can do and I don't want to remove the functionality of anything and I don't expect to have to do a lot of work just to get parts of it working within a CMS, and it would be a lot of work to get it anywhere near the default format.
I've built my own CMS before and the more I started looking at this, the more I could see that I'd have to do this again but with less functionality as I've previously designed them, to allow Price Tapestry to work as effectively as I need it to. Articles on site and similar pages are not a problem and will be easy enough to design and build. The main problem was working about Price Tapestry and how it affects some other pages even though it's not used on a page. It's all been a bit challenging, but from what I have seen and used of Price Tapestry so far, it's a good thing to have.
Make it a bit more flexible and allow full implementation with a CMS and this would be perfect. What I'm trying to work on at the moment is to make the most of Price Tapestry as I can. See what can be done with it considering the limitations placed upon me. The potential of it is huge and if I can get everything working as I need it to then this can be modified to suit different sites of a similar type.Overall Ilike the software and what it can achieve so can't wait to get this site up and running and hopefully make some money.