The problem
Montalto Uffugo is a town near Cosenza, spread over many small villages. Montalto Uffugo Online was built to put local news, shops and services, events and community talk in one place. It later became a local supplement to Cosenza Post.
What I built
A local portal in two generations: first a custom PHP site, then a WordPress newspaper with its own theme.
- Business directory: local shops and companies grouped by sector, from bars and restaurants to building, energy and finance, each with a detail page.
- Classified ads: buy, sell, rent and hire sections for houses, cars and more, with a detail page for every ad.
- Events calendar: events by year with detail pages, and an archive going back to earlier years.
- Town and heritage pages: the town council, useful information, and photo galleries of the historic centre, the churches and each village.
- Local football: results and standings of the regional Eccellenza league for the 2010/2011 and 2011/2012 seasons.
- WordPress newspaper: a custom theme with homepage blocks by category (news, politics, press releases) and a Web TV that pulls the latest video from 4 Facebook pages through the Graph API.
- Community: a forum and guestbook first, then Facebook comments on articles.
Built with
First generation: PHP and MySQL, written by hand. Second generation: WordPress with a custom theme based on Underscores and Bootstrap 4, styles compiled with Sass and Gulp, the Facebook Graph SDK installed with Composer, plus plugins for Facebook comments, a fan box, an image RSS feed and reCAPTCHA on the login page.
Why it was done this way
When the portal moved to WordPress, I wrote the newspaper theme as a reusable code base. The same structure now also runs Cosenza Post, so both papers share section blocks and Facebook video tools.
