Another FarCry 4 Website Launched

Today I wrapped up the final code pieces for a new website (www.acmeautosales.com).

Upon viewing the site we aimed at making the user experience quick and painless; getting the user right to the point (viewing the vehicles that are currently on the lot and for sale).

However, behind the scenes there is much more going on. We're of course using many new features in FarCry 4.0 (formtools, object broker, extended arrays, etc), but there are a few extra tidbits in there to help make things easier for the client.

When the client came to me originally they just wanted the website and a management tool to create and maintain the vehicle data. So we created a normalized database with many relational tables allowing for future growth (ie. A possible Advanced Search in a future release which can use the normalized DB for search filtering).

Then shortly before the initial launch date they asked if it was possible to auto-import the vehicle data daily using limited CSV data.

Long-story-short there is a massive import script in the backend which runs nightly. It takes the CSV file (with only limited data), runs it through a VIN decoding service (web service) and returns the data I need. Any images for the vehicles are uploaded and 5 different sizes are created for each vehicle (used throughout the site for various marking purposes).

Whew, its been a fun site :). We are already planning Phase II for the site and couldn't be more happy (Phase II will incorporate more functionality and update some functionality we couldn't get into Phase I).