Who
David Price and Chase Reeves are working with a local wine bar owner to create Portland's first ever web-based, searchable wine list. The owner, Robert Volz, is Oregon's only Advanced Level Sommelier (and one of only 372 in the world) as well as a great guy and small business owner.
David Price formerly ran OYOAHA, started BlackTonic.com, and now does business design at Growth Science. He's a nice guy.
Chase Reeves is the marketing director for the startup Iterasi, freelances as a web designer, and runs a fancy little blog called www.fatherapprentice.com . He's an even nicer guy (and funnier, too).
What
Most likely a Solr+Sexy-Filter solution. We'll be doing IA, Wireframes, Design, Theming, etc. (unless you want to help in those areas). Robert will be entering all the content. We're hoping 1-2 developers can help make the whole thing hum, so you're going to need a bit of experience under your belt. Robert will be paying for his own hosting, but we will need help setting up the install/management system and are open to recommendations. Oh, yeah… and the whole thing needs to be awesome on an iPad.
Bottom line, we'll all be collaborating together to build this thing. And it'll be fun.
"What's in it for me?"
Glad you asked! This is not a paid project, but it is your chance to have a feature article written about the project in the Oregonian (with you getting all kinds of credit).
But we're keeping tight constraints on this one because, well, it's not paid. The plan is to spend 3-5 evening at Roberts wine bar together where he'll generously keep our bellies full (did I mention he's a world class sommelier?). So it'll be a race to finish the project before time runs out and the wine kicks in!
Bottom line, we're keeping it simple. And fun.
--
If you're interested and available, drop me a line. We're hoping to get rolling within the next couple weeks.
Thanks,
David
Comments
Ballmer Peak
A few glasses of wine to exploit the Ballmer Peak?
http://xkcd.com/323/
jyee - this is hilarious.
jyee - this is hilarious. Love xkcd, but had forgotten about the Ballmer Peak.
Yes, that's exactly what we're hoping to exploit! Only I have a feeling we'll be pushing it a little too far toward the "Windows Me" side of the curve :) It's just that Robert has really really good wine...
Drupal 7 is perfect for this.
Check out the recipe data base i had up in 2 days http://marketstone.com/britney/ let me know if You want a copy of the database and site folder if You want to see how i set things up or use it.
Randy, could be very
Randy, could be very interesting and I'll definitely take a look and get back to you. Any help just laying a quick, simple foundation is what we're attempting to do.
In the spirit of having some fun collaborating on this, would you be interested/available in one 2-3 hour meet up at the wine bar to work together?
Cool project
Just stumbled upon this post and it seems like a cool project, I can tell you that when you start getting into the guts of ApacheSolr it is very powerful and would make a really cool tool for wine searching.
The trick to a really nice facet experience is thinking through the metadata and the facets and then having the content entered correctly. Once that is done, the whole browse/search experience is pretty well polished.
MarketStone is right, D7 and ApacheSolr has some great benefits over D6. Do you guys already have hosting figured out?
(so you don't have to dig through my profile: https://www.opensesame.com/ D7 and ApacheSolr)
Working on a business directory right now,
at http://www.marketstone.com/clients/zeda/ it has mobile, commerce and VOIP will take me a few months. When done the database and sites folder will also be available at www.marketstone.com . What You want to do is make a content type of what the wine record will look like. You have the choice of many different field types you can use for the "content type wine record". Plus You can easily configure how the teaser or full content looks. Then decide how to show the "wine record content type" search, views or categorize menus. ApacheSolr is a great 3rd party search, drupal.org uses it but i hate java. love http://drupal.org/project/search_api , Happy to answer any questions. Drupal 7 is mind boggling Powerful!
Thanks, MarketStone. I'll
Thanks, MarketStone. I'll take a look at your examples for reference. I'm actually old-hat at drupal, so no need to convince me this is a good fit for the project :)
Appreciate the help and thoughts.
excel import
Your client is going to have one of those huge spreadsheets of a wine list. Keep that in mind when You set up the content type so You can import that data.
http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/white-papers/mysql_wp_excel_guide.php
Ha! It's even worse than
Ha! It's even worse than that. Robert has a word document that doubles as a wine list / master! The good news (for us) is that he'll be in charge of "importing" all the data. But you're right, we could make it easier for him :)
Feeds module handles XML and
Feeds module handles XML and CSV imports, so he could try tagging the content in MS Word and exporting as XML. (Note: this assumes that Word's XML is fairly standard) Otherwise it shouldn't be too hard to write a macro to convert it to tab delimited and use the CSV parser in Feeds.
Meetup?
Hi there,
I'd be willing to help out. I'd love to get my hands dirty with some database API work. I'm also curious about how the content types will be defined and the iPad display issue. Have you made any plans for meeting up to work?