Show-ee

http://visitbudapest.travel/

This website is a destination guide for a single city, which features articles, a forum, a complete travel guide and community driven restaurant, event and hotel guides. We wanted to portray the trendy side of the city, as well as showcase its culture and history from an insider’s perspective.

The site is divided into three main areas; articles, guide and travel. One of the key features is being able to relate entries across all of the different sections. To achieve this we used Solspace’s related entries. As an example, if you are viewing an attraction’s page, you will also see other attractions, hotels and restaurants in the neighborhood, as well as related articles, events and tours by category. Geotagger was used for easy addition of custom maps and it also feeds lat/long data into a main map. Being a travel guide, most of the site uses pages, so it made sense to use Structure, which also helped to organize the site’s structure easily.

There is a weblog for each of the different areas (guide, hotels, events, restaurants, etc.) All of the weblogs have custom fields and since many of them are identical we used Gyspsy to manage these. Images are an integral part of the site. The image rotator on the home page and the main pages uses jQuery and images/details are loaded into FFMatrix fields. Guide, hotel, event and restaurant images are comprised of a main image, a thumbnail and a list image. To make loading these easy we used Channel Images, which creates all the different optimized image sizes from a single upload and also allows the user to pick a main image. This made loading the images a breeze for the admin. Images within articles are loaded into FFMatrix fields, which include several selectable custom css settings to set each image’s position. This provides flexibility for the author and also ensures a consistent layout. The articles template uses LG Replace and imgSizer to place the images withing the body of the article.
Hotel and restaurant reviews were a challenge, as we wanted to display both text and star-ratings. We choose Solspace’s Rating module and combined with the jQuery Star Rating Plugin it worked out perfectly. Ratings can be added to a weblog entry through the module or via Freeform if a hotel or restaurant is not listed on the site.

Everything on the home page is automatically derived from site content. Excerpts from articles as well as from the travel guide are controlled via custom entry statuses. Fabee was used for Facebook Connect. We will be porting the site to EE2, as soon as all the extensions and add-ons used are updated.

Other Add-ons

Solspace Related Entries & Rating, REEOrder, Geotagger, TruncHTML