Kieffer's Appliances
- WordPress
- Bootstrap
- Product Data Feed
- Plugin Development
Kieffer's Appliances is a custom WordPress site with numerous advanced features, including and advanced product search and filter, product data feed import, appliance finder wizard, and more. A custom theme was coded, based on Bootstrap, and numerous custom plugins coded to extend site functionality.
Product search enables customers to quickly drill down and find the right appliance. Result pages are linkable, enabling browsing by brand, category, or any other delta.
Product data is provided by a third-party data vendor in an XML format. The XML file is quite large, so is delivered as a zip file. Created a custom multi-step cron with PHP process spawning instead of the built-in WP cron features, as the import is resource intensive and takes too long to complete during a single cron request. Serial XML parser used to iterate the large XML file (500MB+).
Imported data is then stored as an indexed MyISAM table for faster reads and lookups. An activity log keeps track of each import, and reports any errors with the feed process. Will auto-retry the import on fail.
Feed data can also be customized on import by a set of admin-defined rules. Admin users can create and manage rules to re-assign products to different categories, search/replace strings, and trigger rules based on certain product SKUs or manufacturers.
The appliance finder is a step-by-step wizard for finding products - an alternate to the detailed product search page. Instead a visitor chooses a general category (Freezers, Refrigerators, Ovens, etc.), then from one or more levels of sub-categories, then sizes, colors, etc. Upon finishing the wizard a user is shown a list of all matching products.
As with the product data feed, site admins can create and manage rules to control the display order of wizard steps.
Coded the WordPress theme using Bootstrap as the front-end framework. Multiple page templates and custom post types have also been created:
