Building the Youropi.com portal

Youropi.com is a travel, leisure and life-style portal. For many people it’s the perfect starting point to begin a city trip. It was developed by Goyello for a Dutch client in the middle of 2007. Initially it was available only in a Dutch language. Currently there's a German version as well.

How symfony helped us realizing the Youropi.com dream?

From the very outset the client was very demanding and requested quick results. In fact the development team was facing a very challenging “go live” date. The clock was ticking and building a portal totally from scratch was not a real option. Choosing a proper framework was a must. We chose symfony which appeared crucial for the project.

Full stack

Symfony is a full stack framework. Our client had (and still has) big and ambitious plans. And at the very beginning nobody could be sure where we would end. Symfony gave us the confidence that whatever requirement pops up we would be able to realize it.

What's really important we were able to easily implement new things without too much coding. Symfony enabled us to focus on the core of the features as it took care of the boring and repeatable stuff for us.

It's really important from the client's perspective as it makes development cheaper. Using Open Source solution in most cases pays off in less effort that needs to be put in both development and maintenance. In case of symfony client doesn't pay for a large part of the application which is already included in the framework. Maintenance is also cheaper as the framework itself is not developed "in-house" but by a group of experienced developers outside of your company. Big advantage is you don't have to pay them :)

Best practices

From the very beginning the project was planned to run for a long period of time. We all knew it wouldn't be finished after a few months. In such cases keeping the code clean is essential.

Symfony not only provides us with a good code base but it promotes the best coding practices as well. It's everywhere. In the documentation, tutorials, blog posts and source code itself. With symfony it's always about getting the best existing solution. No compromise.

Also, high quality documentation and tutorials help new developers to get started with the extensive framework. Introducing a fresh member to a project becomes quite smooth process because everybody follows a similar approach.

Wind of change

We needed to deliver the first working version in about one month. It wouldn't be possible without a framework. On the one hand, every framework would do. However, not every framework would make it possible to manage and further develop the portal for a long period of time.

Soon it's going to be the 3rd anniversary of Youropi.com launch. We have Dutch and German language versions online and other releases are planned. The project is constantly evolving and it no longer looks like the one we started with.

Symfony works exceptionally well in such a dynamic environments. It seems to be a perfect choice for agile development.

About the author

Jakub Zalas works in Goyello, a dutch-polish IT company. As a PHP Development Manager his main aim is to deliver high quality software with clean and easily maintainable code. He achieves his goals by following the best programming practices and using the best Open Source software. Feel free to follow Jakub on twitter or read one of his blogs (http://www.zalas.eu, http://blog.goyello.com).

This case study was provided by a user of the symfony framework and published with the permission of all parties involved. Are you interested in having your case study published on the symfony blog? Feel free to contact our Community Manager Stefan Koopmanschap (stefan.koopmanschap - at - symfony-project - dot - com).