Student City was elated in disbelief by the splash page. Thus, they contracted us to revamp their Trip Reservation Process. They wanted a method where a customer could invite their friends along with their trip. The method: emulate the facebook invitation process.

IE: get a list of emails from an address book (either from a webmail system or a spreadsheet) and upload content/images.

The invitees would then recieve an email which takes them to a dynamically created page that features the info about the trip and the user-made content and allows them to reserve their slot in the trip.

The Challenge

I had to overcome a few obstacles for this project. They have a huge system, with its own SOAP framework, two seperate databases, and no templates; A bit intimidating.
They have about four devs, but thankfully they had versioning software (Subversion).

First, I had to convert the working pages to Smarty because they had no templates (which would've been next to impossible).

Next I had to write the invitation classes, and sql tables; and begin the integration of the Customer's invitation steps.

They also wanted to redesign the "Choose Add On" page, where the invite process resides. Thankfully, to my usage of Smarty, it wasn't nearly as painful as it could've been.



The biggest challenge was in regards to their reservation process. They wanted to radically redo it. Before: When a customer reserved a trip, it would prompt them to create an account. After: they wanted us to remove that part completely! So, what initially was a self-contained module that would ride above thier system, became an internal development project.

Features

Tripvite Page

Once an invite is created, the invitee is emailed a link to the "homepage" of the invite. It includes the user-created image and content, information about the trip. It also shows all of the other invitees, and their status (whether they're going or not, or haven't decided). From this page, they're able to reserve a trip.

Invite Process

I wrote a javascript Object which essentially became a fully independant application, It handles AJAX requests and utilizes alot of jQuery. Basically, the customer is able to go step-by-step to highlight all of the aspects of the trip for their friends (images, description, etc). This is followed by an invite tool which utilizes email addresses; The user can import their contacts from a webmail application (gmail, yahoo, msn.com) or from a spreadsheet export from their mail program (microsoft outlook, mozilla thunderbird).

Afterword

This project solidified my literacy of jQuery. Also, it strengthened my ability to work with foreign systems, (ie: SOAP).