Hiya,

We’ve just re-launched a South Africa bed and breakfast listing website. The site makes extensive use of categories, and to make it easy for editors to publish content we created a weblog per province. This means an editor can publish a listing straight into the relevant province, and side panel modules pull content from specific weblogs as appropriate. You can see an example of how we used weblogs and categories here:

Weblog (provincial): Western Cape B&B
Category Level 1 (region): Cape Town B&B
Category Level 2 (town): Camps Bay B&B

We had to optimise our templates as we’re experiencing certain times of the day when performance is not quite ideal but I think we’re close to conquering that as a number of queries return a large amount of data. A slight headache was effectively migrating all legacy URL’s from the previous site which was achieved using mod rewrites and a db table to store the URL mapping. This ensures all URL’s are permanently migrated across.

Thanks goes to Laisvunas (child Categories), Solspace (Freeform), Andrew Weaver (CSV Grab), Rick Ellis (Char limiter) and Leevi Graham (Htaccess generator) for the plugins/extensions used in the site.
 
If you have any thoughts or comments, do drop me a message.

Cheers,
Calan

Calan,

Great work. Clear layout and well thought out. The only comment I would have is that some sort of integration with Google maps and general information about the areas you are listing

As a prospective traveller to South Africa you gotta assume I have no idea where everything is.

Hi John,

Cheers for the reply. We needed to get the site up fairly quickly so haven’t added maps yet but we’re adding a map to the homepage so that a user can simply click the area of the country they’re interested in.

In terms of more info, we might get there eventually though it’s a decent undertaking to provide all that content. I’ll have a chat to the team but thanks for the suggestion.

Regarding my post above on performance, it turned out that the Child Categories plugin was causing the problem. As we have about 800 categories, it was iterating through all of them, creating a query for every category and crashing the server. In the end, I turned the area list into static blocks which has made the site very fast. We’re also resizing all photos as they’re still optimised for the previous site and will speed things up even more.

Thanks for the thoughts.

Calan

P.S. Anyone using that plugin on a site with a large number of categories might want to review the number of queries being generated.

it is often possible to write a bit of custom php that can do what the child categories plugin does in a single query and roughly 2 loops through the returned data.  I’ve done it for nav-building purposes a couple times. I implemented it as a custom plugin and turned tag caching on for nearly static level performance.  Of course if you’re not going to need to change your categories often then static should be fine.

Nice site, I would highly agree with John and hook up with google maps, and maybe do something along the lines of what the travel sites do for travel arangements

Nice site, great layout.