Market Contours: community-driven trading software

Market Contours is a microISV (one-person software company) that produces tools for financial traders. Both the web site and the software are meant to be community-driven, allowing me to interact with a group of interested users in a transparent way. Drupal was an obvious choice.

Deciding on Drupal

I began looking at CMS solutions for Market Contours back in February of 2005. I knew I wanted to build a web site that would focus on community and transparency. This meant support for registered users, blogging, forums and news items. Drupal made the short list very quickly. I did look at a few other CMS solutions, notably Mambo. What really sold me on Drupal was:

• The community that exists on this web site. Drupal is not only great software, it's also a perfect demonstration of how the software should be used.
• The open architecture and the wide variety of modules available. Especially important in my decision was the project module. Any attempt at forming a community around a software product depends greatly on making it easy for users to submit bug reports and feature requests.

Building the site

Having chosen Drupal, I settled down to build the site. I decided early on I wanted to use the phptemplate engine because of the flexibility it offered. It was extremely easy to structure the pages using the templates provided.

Styling was another story. CSS work takes a lot of patience, and I have to say that this was the most frustrating part of the process. I started by trying to modify the box_grey template, and was a little overwhelmed by the number of elements that were being styled. Working with an existing template was a great way to learn what the possibilities were, but in the end I found it easier to start with a clean slate. I'm sure there are elements I've left unstyled, but they're not an issue yet.

The next step was integrating the project module, which was pretty straightforward. I did make some changes to eliminate the "project" and "assigned" fields from the UI. In my case there is only one project and one developer, so these fields are redundant. On the issue entry page, these values are defaulted with hidden variables. It would be great if this could be done through configuration settings or styling (I know, file a feature request).

Deployment

The site is currently running on Drupal 4.6.3 and hosted on Lunarpages. So far I'm happy with Lunarpages, and their forums have been great for ironing out problems. Here are a few issues I ran into:

• I developed locally against MySQL 4.1.8, but Lunarpages is on 4.0.25. Of course, the SQL I exported locally wouldn't execute on the remote server. I had to remove all references to collation sequences, and everything ran fine after that.
• Lunarpages runs PHP as CGI, not as an Apache module. Because of this, the settings in .htaccess and in settings.php do net get applied. Adding a php.ini with these settings solved the problem.

Other than that, deploying Drupal on Lunarpages was fairly easy.

Thank you

I want to finish up by saying thank you to everyone involved with Drupal. The software is designed, constructed, and supported extremely well. Drupal is an inspiration to all of us trying to create community-driven software.

Patrick Paulin
Market Contours
Trading strategy development made easy