CPA Site Solutions, a provider of CPA websites for accountants, announced they recently redeveloped their proprietary Email Marketing System using new architecture, methodology, and coding standards.

CodeIgniter Cut Down on Time Spent Coding

The niche web developer opted to use CodeIgniter for the system’s architecture.

“We evaluated several frameworks for PHP web application development. Many of them could have worked, but they really tried to lock you in to their way of doing things,” explains Bob Rayl, Chief Technology Officer at CPA Site Solutions. “They did not offer the flexibility we need to accomplish some of the heavily proprietary functionality we bundle into our systems.”

CodeIgniter is an Application Development Framework for PHP developers. It provides a rich set of libraries for commonly needed tasks. CodeIgniter considerably trimmed the hours developers spent writing tedious code. And because the code comes secured and optimized out of the box, the team saved additional time and resources on those tasks.

The team chose NetBeans, an integrated development environment (IDE), for their new interface.

Localized Server Streamlined Testing and QA

The tech team at CPA Site Solutions chose to use a localized server for code development and testing on which they could “step-through” their code line by line as it was running on an isolated test environment. This enabled them to catch bugs early in the development cycle, resulting in less end-of-development quality assurance.

The team could also access a step-by-step history of the code, quickly leading them to the cause of any new bugs. And with a roll-back function in place, they could return to a previous working version if problematic code reached the production environment.

Finally, the localized server allowed multiple developers to work on the same project without having to trade entire copies of the code. Each developer simply located the latest version from the server to be in sync with other team members. They could also test small bits of code on their own working area of the server, so their testing and QA didn’t slow down the rest of the team.

New Coding Practices Increased Team Efficiency

For the application rebuild, CPA Site Solutions wrote object-oriented, reusable code that extends the basic functionality of CodeIgniter. They also wrote libraries that sit in a separate website but deliver programmatic data to their CodeIgniter applications. For example, getting a firm’s domain information will never need to be written into any given application again; it’s now served via a service the team created and centralized.

About CPA Site Solutions

CPA Site Solutions (http://www.cpasitesolutions.com) provides websites for more than 5,000 CPA and Accounting firms. They offer personalized websites, a dedicated webmaster, a secure client portal, a client newsletter, secure email accounts, search engine optimization, and 109 additional website features designed specifically for Accountants.

Via EPR Network
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