The Unsigned Guide

News and announcements Yii-powered Applications
1

Hello!

The agency I work for (Via Studios) recently worked with The Unsigned Guide to relaunch their business from being an annually printed book to being online only. The core of that is the Members-only system that revolves around their huge contacts database. The main website isn’t running with Yii (yet!) but it gives you guys a little more context if I share that with you :slight_smile:

Main website:

http://www.theunsignedguide.com

Members website: (see the Tour pages to see what it looks like on the inside!)

We’ve used Yii Framework (1.1.8) to rapidly develop their Members site which acts as a large, specialised search engine for over 8,000 music industry contacts.

It uses caching (schema, variable & fragment, all using CFileCache) to help improvement performance (as it’s using shared hosting which include XCache to store op-code in memory), and the database is spread across 2 large Microsoft SQL Server databases (which can be done seamlessly).

The Members website also uses the brilliant ExtendedClientScript to minify/unify all the javascript & CSS. It also uses the Postmark-Yii component to handle all e-mail transactions (check out the most excellent PostmarkApp if you ever need to send a large amount of e-mails; it offers a huge amount of analytics/visualization & support).

Any questions, please feel free to ask!

2

nicely done!

3

Really nice work!

I see that you are using HTML5, and managed to bring down the resources to one stylesheet, a major js file and one minor js script.

Which is impressive. :)

I’ll take a look at the minscript extension.

Congrats.

And let’s hope you get to do the front soon.

4

Very nice design!

5

Thanks guys - much appreciated! I can’t take credit for the design (as our designer did it!) but it was fun using Yii to develop on top of a large legacy database.

@jacmoe: We used Minify on the Main website because it wasn’t running on Yii - it’s very simple to use though! I prefer to use ExtendedClientScript for Yii as it’s seamless.

6

Very nicely done, congratulations… and very industry field you are touching :)

7

I am diggin the theme!

BTW you have a broken image on the very top left at the members login page.

8

Thanks for spotting it - it’s a static version of the Google Analytics tracking code, appears to be some broken cookie code in there so the 1x1 pixel image isn’t rendering.

9

I love your theme by the way. Very unique! Only a few things that I would change…

  1. Lower the text on the ribbons just a few pixels…

.h2-ribbon {

height: 35px;

padding-top: 4px;

}

  1. Add some text shadow to your H1 tags.

  2. Not sure if this is something you would want to do… But I noticed you have several H1s on your homepage. For SEO you should really only have one H1 tag. Just something that I read from several SEO blogs.

Fix that and its 11/10 :)