Hittage.com - Local business directory

Hittage.com is a review and recommendation site for local Canadian businesses. Users have the ability to leave reviews and vote for there favorite businesses in there area. I’ve summarized how I built the site, including the history, research, and the modules used in this write up.

http://www.hittage.com

I am hoping to get some feedback and recommendations on the usability of the site.

Goal

The motivation for building this site was to offer a community for Canadian’s to come and to be able to find legitimate local businesses and/or services and read recommendations other users have commented on. I am a firm believer in word of mouth, and survival of the fittest. Sites like Yelp and Insiderpages are available for American cities, but nothing was available for Canadian cities. And sites like Yellow Pages and BBB were not sufficient for Canadian’s to determine if the businesses they deal with are legitimate and honest.

History

I’ve been playing with Drupal for over a year, and this is my first drupal site. For a span of six months I researched several Content Management Systems including Share Point, DotNetNuke, Joomla, XOOP, and Drupal. Based on cost and community support I was able to narrow down my list to Joomla and Drupal. After extensive research and hands on development of the two, I picked Drupal and very happy that I did. The Drupal community is huge and very active, that can be seen by the extensive module contributions and forum activity.

Development Environment

As a professional software developer, I know the benefits and time savings of a proper development tools. The tools I have been using are XAMPP, PhpEd, MySQL Toad, and Unfuddle. I’ve been using Unfuddle to serve as my project management tool and source control repository. I have found Unfuddle to be an extremely valuable tool to manage tickets, defects, releases, and source control. I would recommend Unfuddle to anyone looking for a free project management tool and source control repository.

Module List

The site is built on Drupal 5.10, and many customized modules.

I have a total of 50+ modules used for the site, but the modules listed here would be considered the core:

• advanced_profile
• avatar_blocks
• apachesolr
• bio
• blocktheme
• buddylist
• captcha
• cck
• extra_voting_forms
• feedback
• flag_content
• gmap
• hierarchical_select
• imagecache
• kudos
• recaptcha
• share
• themesettingsapi
• votingapi

Lessons Learned

• I’ve been using PhpEd and it’s worth every penny. The IDE is very user friendly, and the real time debugger is one of the best I’ve worked with. Using PhpEd has helped me a lot in learning PHP and the Drupal framework.
• Deploying Drupal to a production environment from a development environment isn’t very smooth or seamless. Biggest challenge I had is with updates or upgrades to production, is the migration of the settings for each new module from development.
• Firebug is awesome for layout design and theming.
• If you have a problem with Drupal, chances are ten other people have had the same problem. The community is great to get questions answered, so be patient and google is your friend.