James Roy

Classic Cable Cars is a tour operator in San Francisco.

The company sells tickets for four tour types. Centaman’s system allows for a coupon to be only for a specific tour or apply to some or all of them. Each tour has its own set of rules which can be set by the company.

The goal was to allow a customer to enter their coupon on checkout which would then query Centaman's API, if the coupon were valid then it would be processed against several checks to ensure that it was applicable for the tour type. If confirmed as valid, then the price would be updated on the page showing the discount applied along with a new total. This was all done with Ajax.

The logging system was built using Monolog. Its sole focus is whether a transaction succeeds or fails and if it fails, why. The metrics system piggybacked on the logging process so it would trigger at the same points while sending it’s data to a StatsD server using a PHP StatsD client.

The first step of the transaction is to select a date for a tour using a jQuery date picker. Using the Centaman API, a new system was built to confirm vacancies. If it were unavailable for any reason, the dates would be disabled and indicated with a visual at the start.

The Problem:
WooCommerce Bookings is not very multilingual friendly. As an example, a booking done in English will not automatically make the booking for the German translation of the product. There was a lot of manual work required to ensure no double bookings for a product occurred when a reservation was made.

The Solution:
When a user made a reservation, the plugin would duplicate the same information and its state (paid, pending, and more) for each language installed on the website. There were three additional functions. As new products were added, they were duplicated for each language, so the web administrator only needed to change the text for each respective language while having the specifications remain identical. Lastly, the administrator could upload an Excel file to the website for any in-store bookings, which would automatically book the respective product and its associated translations. It also would free up any products which had been returned that were noted in the Excel file as well.

The Problem:
How to use the WordPress Customizer to manage the variables of the Bootstrap framework and how to process SCSS files into a CSS file directly within the website.

The Solution:
Integrate the SCSSPHP compiler to handle the the compiling of the SCSS files into an optimized CSS file. In total, there were approximately 30 variables which when changed would require the compiler to process a new stylesheet. Unlike LibSass, SCSSPHP is resource intensive and relatively slow. The plugin produced a reference file which was used to see if the compiler needed to run so that there were no unnecessary program initiations if a setting changed within Customizer that was not related to one of the managed variables. The plugin also produced a cache busting CSS file so that any changes which were made would automatically be downloaded by previous visitors to the website.

This project encompasses five websites. The concept was to break apart an old website into distinct sites that shared a foundation while being able to have control over design and layout to give each its own identity.

From there, the goals for each are unique in scope. These included the flagship sites (Moto-Center Thun & Bern), a primary informational site (Tacho-Bar), event management (Racing Tours) to a bike rental site with online booking capabilities. Additionally, these sites all run from a multi-site WordPress installation with a multilingual setup on some plus the websites with a customized drag-n-drop layout builder with over 40 custom layout tools.