Last week, we launched a new version of Access to Medicine. The Access to Medicine Foundation stimulates and guides pharmaceutical companies to do more for the people living in low- and middle-income countries without access to medicine. Once every two years, ATM publishes an Index.This Index analyses how 20 of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies are addressing access to medicine in 106 low- to middle-income countries for 77 diseases, conditions and pathogens.
Before building this website, we had a few choices to make. The current website consists of different URLS for the different labels of ATM. In the end, one codebase was used. The client admires to combine all those URLS into one new web-application. The current websites were build using Wordpress Multisite. We decided that that wasn’t the way to go for us. Wordpress is a great system for blogs and small websites. This is where our journey started.
Together with Just and the client, we did a couple of sprints in a SCRUM like process. In these sprints, ideas where brought together and a brand new website was realised. At the design side, Just made a really beautiful design for the website. With the power of Pakt and Just combined, smart decisions were made. For example, we created a smart ‘block’ system. With these building blocks, the client can create unique pages and still leverage the design without breaking the website. These building blocks are created with the use of Single Table Inheritance.
The serverside of the project is build using Symfony4. Techniques like Elasticsearch, Bootstrap and WebPack are leveraged in this project as well.
Even in 2018, we think it’s useless to build a ‘from the ground up system’ yourself. We love open source projects and i’d lke to mention a few we’ve used in this project. We also want to give something back to the community:
- sonata-project/admin-bundle; the admin system behind the application.
- wearejust/sonata-theme-bundle We think that the default theme of Sonata Admin is not suited for the needs of our clients. We like clean and simple designs/solutions. Therefore, we created a custom theme.
- symfony/web-link The production server (hosted by Exonet) leverages HTTP2. This means we can push content (CSS/JS/Video etc.) to the client. This package helps us do this.
- tightenco/collect We've become addicted to Laravel's usage of collections. So we almost always include this in our projects!
- infogram/infogram Our client publishes lots of graphs/data on their website. This small little package helps use the API of Infogram.
- wearejust/redirect-bundle Our own little bundle that helps integrating redirects into Sonata Admin.
We think we did a fantastic job of building this new platform for ATM. Please take a look at the website and judge yourself!