Arena.net
While I don’t work on the team responsible for the Arena.net site I help out all over the company wherever I can. When it was decided that the old site needed to be updated I got the call. After some discussions around what exactly the site should encompass it came down to wanting to have the site be an aggregator of updates by arena.net on various different services.
Here’s the rundown:
I certainly wasn’t looking forward to building parsers for the multiple different feed types that entails, but YQL came along and saved the day again. I only had to do simple things manually like make sure that Twitter links & @username replies were properly wrappped in <a> tags. To keep from bashing on YQL every time the page is loaded it stores the transformed results of the updates for an hour in a local APC cache. This provided the best of both worlds and made caching super-easy.
The site itself was built using YUI grids, YUI 3b1, and DD_belatedPNG to solve transparent PNG issues in IE6. It’s also using my favorite new PHP framework, Nice Dog. It’s a nano framework (about 100 lines) that is more of a VC than MVC. For a site like Arena.net it’s perfect as there’s no need for models. I could’ve plugged in an ORM to make it the full stack but when getting all your data is as simple as
apc_fetch($key);
the need to build a “proper” MVC site kinda isn’t there any longer.
September 18th, 2009 Comments Off
