Content Delivery

We used Zend Framework MVC for the broad architecture. One of the requirements was a phased rollout by site section and Zend's library-style approach made this integration quite easy. Unlike many implementations of MVC, we made the models do as much work as possible collecting data to a uniform interface rather than just being a database wrapper. This made it much easier for producers to able to quickly turn round bespoke promotions and brought an immediate commercial benefit to the organisation.

A key tenet of the design was to minimise direct contact with the database and abstract this as early as possible. This meant that the system could be used by developers of varying ability and gave a strategic benefit of being able to change the database schema or data source at any time during or after the project with no disruption.

To do this we created an API interface based loosely on Google's data API. This was a tried and trusted model which we could be sure would give us a good balance of flexibility with ease of use. (There was also a strategic benefit in that it would also be reasonably straightforward to extend this with a web services wrapper for use in cross-site data sharing and syndication.)

One of the defining aspects of this was that our models work with collections of data rather than single items. This prevented a database read for each item without making the mistake of trying to fetch too much in a single big query (which can be very inefficient on a dynamic page).

As part of this project, an SEO consultation was undertaken and implemented in a site refresh. Designs were made directly in HTML/CSS and we converted these to industry-standard Smarty templates. The Zend templating layer was adapted to use Smarty for its output instead of its standard PHP templating layer. (This had been used in a previous project and proved difficult for front-end coders to work with.) We also wrote some Smarty plugins to improve typography and caching of stylesheets.

For NME.com, we overhauled the video section to show YouTube videos pulled in dynamically using their API. As part of this, we created a search for music videos and this search was also linked to from each video's keywords. This created a compelling user experience and this section grew to account for 30% of the site's traffic (from 1%) over the course of 4 months.

We created a simplified faceted search experience based on the Endeca interface for the NME.com news section. This allowed a user to search news stories and drill down by artist, date and country.