Recently I’ve been working on a replacement for the aging Coyote-Sports web setup. It’s served us well since I started writing it in 2007 at the tender age of sixteen. The system has grown and become a horribly tangled mess of PHP, Perl, C++ daemons and API calls. It still runs well, but modifications and fixes are getting particularly difficult, and a few months ago I started to make some serious moves to rewrite it.
I decided not to write the solution to be targeted only at Coyote Sports’ needs. The solution will be suitable for use by many other companies with similar wholesale/b2b business models to Coyote Sports.
The solution, at least at this time, is going under the name b2bFront. It will comprise a frontend website, skinnable using a custom MVC system, as well as an extensive, modular back office from which members of staff can manage the operation of the website, manipulate the inventory and more.
Early plans stipulated on various ways of breaking the system up in to modules – the spaghetti structure (or lack thereof) of the previous system was the major contributor to the need for a rewrite as dependancies and unexpected impacts of changes became more and more difficult to avoid. Once I had a basic psuedo-UML diagram of the operation of the system, which took several days to hammer out, I began writing classes, sketching interface elements and planning the more subtle nuances of the HCI that would be all-important in a successful solution.
b2bFront Inventory Screen