gone fishin'
Who are they?
Charles Newland is the proprietor of Newlands Lodge, a fishing lodge and conference centre based in Arkansas, USA.
This project was an unusual undertaking for Foxsoft in that that Charles, a keen programmer himself, wanted to be involved in the programming aspect of the system. No problem.
What they wanted
Charles, in partnership with a colleague, had developed a number of tables using Foxbase. He was considering updating the software he was using to make his business more efficient, but was unsure if he should utilise an updated version of FoxPro or create a web based application using TYPO3. After finding us on the internet he contacted us via our website, asking for advice on which system would better fit his planned direction.
It soon became clear that his practical approach to the development and eagerness to contribute to the programming would take the bulk of the project into FoxPro. So it was decided that a hybrid of both technologies would be the solution Charles needed.
How we did it
Allowing Charles to become a temporary member of the development team was a unique experience. We paired him with Hugh as his mentor for the development and gradually he became less and less reliant on Hugh for the development of the project
The first part of the project would be to take Charles' website design ideas and incorporate them into TYPO3. While Adré took Charles and his team through this side of the project, Hugh got down to the arduous task of restructuring and validating the data in the existing Foxbase tables and consolidating them into a Visual FoxPro Database. A great deal of care was needed during restructuring due to the piece-meal nature of the original database to ensure that no data was lost.
Once the data was in a more coherent state, the FoxPro application quickly started to take shape; it was at this time that Charles started to get involved with the development of the application and made a heroic dive into object oriented programming.
Project highlights
A calendar view of the lodge's reservations, with the ability to drill down from a monthly overview down to daily details.
Charles now has complete control over both his FoxPro application & TYPO3 website.
Temporarily expanding the development team for such a nice guy.