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The Superbreak.com homepage
The Superbreak.com 'Winter Sale' page

URL: http://www.superbreak.com

The Superbreak.com website was presented utilising a Coldfusion MX Mach-II application. This looks to have been replaced with a .Net solution now.

'Mach-II' consists of a basic MVC framework which incorporates an XML configuration component, some 'event handlers' (and their corresponding Coldfusion component code), filters, plugins, page views and some other components.

Simply put this means that there are not individual page elements corresponding to specific pages presented on the website.

It was therefore necessary to follow the Mach-II architecture to implement the clients requirements.

Application amendments to render SEO friendly URLs

The application generated the URL paths for pages based on application logic and an XML configuration component.

The client required that top level pages (basically those available in the left hand navigation tree) were presented under more Search Engine Optimised 'friendly' URLs. Meaning that the URLs were more descriptive of the content displayed by that specific resource.

An example being that the original UK & Ireland sub-element 'Channel Islands' was presented under the URL 'http://www.superbreak.com/browse/location-CHA.htm', where as the new URL is 'http://www.superbreak.com/channel_islands-hotels-CHA.htm'. The code 'CHA' being retained to allow the application to identify which piece of content required displaying by the page.

So basically the amendment involved including the name of the location or the name of the hotel and in folder locations and filenames, more accurately reflecting the content.

It was necessary to modify the core Mach-II application to incorporate an additional 'event-handler' and 'filter' to provide the necessary logic to facilitate this change.

Extend 'Administration' suite to provide 'theatre review' management

The Superbreak website already presented hotel reviews written by Superbreak customers. In addition to this it was required that the application was extended to also present reviews of theatres and individual shows at those theatres. These reviews also being written by Superbreak customers.

The first phase of this work involved amending the existing Administration suite to allow 'editors' to manage these 'Theatre Reviews'.

This involved modifying the existing database to provide storage for the reviews, along with developing necessary stored procedures to retrieve and manipulate the reviews.

The next element involved extending the existing 'Hotel review' form interface to include the relevant 'Theatre Review' data to provide management tools to the internal Superbreak editors.

The next phase of this work involved amending the front end 'Theatre' pages so that they incorporate the 'Theatre reviews'. This work was carried out internally by Superbreak.

Creation of 'Winter Sale' page

Again, this involved amending the underlying Mach-II application to include the 'Winter Sale' option in the 'Offers' menu listing.

Followed by creating a corresponding 'event-handler' and 'views' to present the required page. This also involved amending the Search tool to include the snowflake background only on this page.

It was also required that this page was available on other branded versions of the site and rendered with different presentation styles.