The new layout is created by a dutch company called Puurpxl. They've improved the interface a lot and created a new look and feel. We at Ibuildings did the technical stuff. We've worked together very closely. Puurpxl's designers had access to the code repository. Having write access for both the designers as developers allowed us to work in parallel and respond to each other rapidly. Since we had to deliver the project in a relative short time it was very convenient working this way.

We built the site on a LAMP stack. We've used Zend Framework to build the front-end. Zend Framework has proven to be stable and reliable with high performance websites and suits the project very well. We built a CMS based on ATK. ATK is very good in rapid CRUD operations development and allowed us to build a custom made CMS very quickly. Kieskeurig's current back-office is based on the IBM Lotus Domino architecture. The previous site was directly build on-top of the Domino architecture. Since most of the content is provided by their current back-office database we had to make use of that current database. We used a Service Oriented Architecture for interoperability. The front-end uses a REST interface to talk to the Domino servers. We have caching layers on both sides in order to have optimal performance. As a result website performance increased considerable compared to the old site, and we now have flexibility in changing other components.

To ensure the best quality we have a staging environment and are using PHPUnit for testing our code.

Moving the site to PHP is the start of more new developments. With this move, we have increased the flexibility of the site and improved performance significantly. Kieskeurig will constantly keep improving. Watch out for new features in the near future. (Let me know if you have any feedback regarding the site.)