Let’s talk food & wine

I’ve recently enjoyed building a web site for the business of a friend and ex-boss, Eddie Cheng. Eddie is now semi-retired but is the resident bon viveur and owner of Bottles & Cooks – a food and drink social network dedicated to discussing all matters epicurean and bacchanalian. In Eddie’s own words his “main interest is wine, rugby, food and cricket (in that order)” and his new business enables him to celebrate items one and three on that list, although one of his reviews on Bottles & Cooks also mentions JPR Williams. Anyway, I shall enjoy following the conversation on the new site and I hope that you do too.

www.bottlesandcooks.com

This paragraph contains a bit of chat about the technical aspects of the site (a gentle warning to those readers who like to skip that sort of thing …). The site is based on WordPress although for this site I’ve actually had to get my hands dirty and write a bit of code to provide a few bits of bespoke functionality. Each of the main three sections—”Ask Eddie”, “Restaurants and pubs” and “Shopping experience”—is based on a WordPress category, but in order to create custom templates for each category I had to replace the theme’s category template page with a simple controller that sends the user to one of several custom template pages depending on what category is being viewed. I used the geo-mashup plug-in, which uses Google’s mapping API to tag articles geographically, to provide the geographical, map-index of articles. To ensure this could be easily extended, for example by adding more and more local maps as data accrues, I again actually had to write some code, in this case not changing anything in WordPress but adding some new functionality. At present there are only some areas of the UK represented on the locations index page; as articles are written and tagged for other areas of the country or indeed anywhere else in the world the relevant map-indices will be added (without any more code needing to be written).

Bottles & Cooks encourages users to contribute to three, self-explanatory sections – “Ask Eddie”, “Restaurants and pubs” and “Shopping experience”. The site also features integration—these days de rigeur—allowing users to share items on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook et al. All items posted to the site are also tweeted by @bottlesandcooks in case you wish to follow on Twitter. Users may also subscribe to the RSS feed, via e-mail and via various other means. Thus far most of the content has been provided by Eddie, but once the site is launched I hope the content will start to pour in from keyboards far and wide with tales of epicurean joy and woe. I have had the pleasure of working with various enthusiastic gastronomes over the years, and I hope that three other previous bosses—Clive, Bertrand and David—will have some well-informed and interesting contributions to make to Bottles & Cooks. As I enjoyed working for Eddie when we worked at Yell I have once more enjoyed working with him on this site, albeit using a very different decision-making and project process from that used at Yell.com.

Anyway, cheers and bon appetit – and good luck Eddie with your new venture.