Split Tech City

Requirements

Goal of Split Tech City was to create an online platform, implemented within the WordPress CMS, that will gather companies, meetups, individuals, institutions, organizations, coworkings, startups and events in the city of Split, under the same roof. As such, it required community section, which would display all members of the community, and an events section, which would display upcoming and past events in the community. For this purpose it was required to develop two separate WordPress plugins, calendar and community, which also needed to allow site admins to add community entities and calendar groups. Other requirements included a blog, where all the important news from community will be published, Split Tech City  TV, which would connect to YouTube channel and display latest streams/videos, an image slider, which would display feed from IG/Twitter with a specified hashtag, automated slack invite form, which would send slack invites to submitted e-mails. Site needed to be multi-language, with HR version targeting locals and EN version for non-natives .

Challenges

The first, and most complex part of the project was to develop custom WordPress calendar plugin which would connect to Meetup and Facebook API and get information on Meetup/Facebook groups, its events, venues, organizers, etc. The idea was to create an automatic process which would allow a plugin connection to previously mentioned external APIs and then it could request various data for each entered group. Process would repeat every 5 minutes so it doesn’t cause too much of a strain on the entire site. The plugin also needed to handle possibility of a large number of events and that is why it would only collect a small ammount of data per cicle, making it much more efficient. Some other calendar plugin features include

• Option to automatically publish events
• Generating group’s statistics, such as organised events count, members count, etc.
• Logger, which enables site admin to check whether everything is functioning properly
• Event filtering
• Google maps event location
• Option to generate event agenda

In the next phase it was required to develop Tech City WordPress theme and the remaining plugins, Split Tech City Community, Split Tech City TV, Tech City Facebook Comments,  Slack Invite. The purpose of Split Tech City Community plugin was to give each member of the community his own personal space on the site, where they could write about themselves, their interests, plans, or put a link for their own website. Split Tech City TV would display streams from latest events, and with community and calendar it was an all rounded story. Since it’s launch over 20 companies and over 20 meetups, institutions, coworkings in the community have already joined Split Tech City.

Development time

~ 5 months

Compatibility

IE10+, iOS8+, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari etc.