Today was the most productive day I had in a long time.
Don’t know why or how it happened but tasks were ticked from the today list in a smooth and pleasant flow despite attending a client meeting outside.

It’s now 20:15 Dubai time, I finished my jog, kids are asleep, I had dinner: why stop playing if you’re on a roll?

For industrialsDirectory.com, I’ve long planned a feature providing exhibition and events information to the industrial and B2B users in the middle east. Lets call this feature the event service.

As usual, it’s all started with some diagrams:

My wife told me for years that she though my job was drawing boxes and pipes on piles of paper I will then scatter accross whatever planed surface I will consider “my office”.

The problem

I want to manage and display a comprehensive list of events for industrialsDirectory.com (iD) users.
iD has been developed with a custom framework built on top of the Joomla CMS. Joomla (at least the original version used here) is not flexible enough to handle this project.

The solution

Wordpress!
Wordpress, IMHO, is the most versatile and extensible framework for Web Content Management should you not require features like user profile, advanced search or heavy OO design patterns.
Wordpress give you the ability to use its simple taxonomy to publish any type of content. Its core features are:

• powerful templating system
• built for maximum SEO benefit
• amazing plugins management
• complete documentation and online resources
• built-in rss support
• …

Goal

Deliver the new feature in 4 hours, as simple as that.
Specs:

• Events management interface (CRUD)
• Events categorization
• Events publishing into Joomla CMS*
• Events RSS feeds
• Adversting integration

* ideally, I would like to use a full fledge web service (SOAP server on Wordpress and SOAP client on Joomla developed with nuSOAP) but I may start with a simple XML feed due to time constraint).

Tools

The infrastructure is ready, wich will obviously save a lot of time.
Webserver, DNS, database server, IDE are up an running (let me know if you want more details, nothing fancy here).
Plugins list to follow.

Other resources: