What can you tell us about the site in general? What are the goals of the site and the main audience?

Infinitybladegame.com is a promotional site for Epic Games and ChAIR Entertainment’s upcoming release of Infinity Blade II. IB2 is a premiere mobile game available on iOS devices and has been featured on numerous ads run by Apple in many media channels, from TV ads to in-store hardware and physical display promotions.

What was your major consideration in using ExpressionEngine for this?

The client needed an easy way to manage various portions of content for the site as it came closer to launch-time for the game. This included videos, images and user downloads. Additionally, the site also needed to pull in a feeds from their community blog. ExpressionEngine made an ideal fit as we were immediately able to leverage EE’s out-of-the-box functionality to accomplish a great deal of this functionality.

ExpressionEngine is also an interface the client is used to using from other projects we are working with them on. The clients familiarity with EE, along with EE’s ease of development made continuing with ExpressionEngine a natural fit for the new site.

Were there any Commercial Add-ons that proved useful? If so, which ones? How did they help?

Absolutely!

-AJW Feedreader - We used this RSS feedreader as an alternative to Magpie, as it gave some templating options and other features we required to meet some client needs

-CE Img - This plugin is great for image resizing and is one we continue to use on most projects. This really helps ensure design integrity when giving a site over to any client that is uploading images.

-Pixel and Tonic - Matrix - One of our go-to field types used most often for entry groupings such as image galleries.

-Pixel and Tonic - Wygwam - Our go-to field type for any client-generated content. It just works, and most clients are already familiar with the popular WYSIWYGs.

Did you do any custom add-on development? 

To meet varying client needs, we almost always include custom add-on development for every EE site we launch. This site, while small, was no exception.

-RSS Feed - Due to server security restrictions, an RSS feed we grabbed from needed to come directly from a database, so we leveraged the power of CodeIgniter with EE Module development to create a custom feed module that spoke directly to an additional database and converted results into proper EE template tags.

-MX Mobile Detect - We used a portion of its functionality to create a global variable very early in EE’s run-time, allowing us more control over mobile vs non-mobile templates and reducing template parsing load and large HTTP requests.

-Youtube field - A custom field type we developed and re-use often, this field type parses Youtube’s many forms of URLs and grabs the video ID, to be used and returned via template tags in many formats.

-DS SEO - Our home-brewed SEO module which allows for proper meta-data to be set on a per-entry basis. This is our commercial release that is based on our open source Expression Engine 2.0 SEO module we released back in early 2010.

What is next on the plate for infinitybladegame.com? Any additional functionality you can tell us about?

This Infinity Blade II site will become more fully featured after the game is officially launched in December, including more information for the users as well as more social components to drive awareness and user interest in this best-selling iOS game.

Do you have any other information you’d like to share with the community? Tips from this project you’d like to share? Lessons you’ve learned?

Always tear third-party add ons apart and see how you can do better! We often save a ton of load time by reducing a third-party add-on or modifying them to meet our specific needs, as we did with MX Mobile Detect in this project.

It’s also VERY helpful to have a base ExpressionEngine install, leveraging principles from Focus Lab’s EE Master Config for site portability. 

We also combine all projects in with the Git work flow created by Nvie - GitFlow. The custom configurations and proper code versioning greatly increase our development productivity and ease of deployment.