FENS – Future Events News Service
FENS is a B2B service that is essentially a database of celebrity, sporting and other events. Need to know when to lay on extra trains to Wembley Stadium? Need to know when George Clooney is in London? FENS supplies a whole series of industries.
An amazing database
Current live “stories” 171k
Huge traffic
235k per year
See for yourself
www.fensinformation.com
A unique company & a unique database
We created a new brand, corporate guidelines and (of course) website. The aim was to separate but link the various sectors that FENS work in – from celebrity to transport.
This project (and company) has since branched so that the Travel section is now its own company: TENs
Under the Hood
Yii PHP and MySQL running on a dedicated server making tens of GB of data available to subscribers via daily emails, API and search.
Why we think this project is sexy
Back in 2011 the FENS team engaged us to build a web based application to replace an aging Oracle database. We had to replicate all the existing functionality and improve on it, and migrate the existing data (about 60GB) into a new data structure that was better optimised for searching. Another consideration was to streamline the event inputting process to be as time-saving as possible so that the editors could concentrate on the events.
Cool admin features:
– All stories subedited before being published
– Auto tagging of stories
– Full audit history of changes to content
– Auto recycling of repeating events.
– Flexible user trials
– Auto archiving of old stories to maintain speed of search
– Syncing with Celebrity Bulletin database
Cool user features:
– Powerful and quick search interface
– search history
– searches can be saved and deployed as daily or weekly emails
– Custom data feeds
We have maintained and supported this application and it is still fit for purpose today and running on latest versions of php and MySQL.
How did you meet Practically?
“Recommendation and personal introduction“
What were your expectations of the project?
“To improve the search functionality of our existing product offering coupled with a user friendly interface.“
How do you feel the project went?
“Very well, all the objectives were achieved.“
Do you still work with Practically? If so what is your ongoing relationship like?
“Yes, excellent working relationship“
“Very responsive to requests and helpful practical advice.”
Neal Goddard, FENS
“Can do attitude“
