Looking Forward to PHP 7

Release Coming Soon

We have recently started to evaluate our website using the beta1 version of PHP 7 which is based on PHPNG (PHP Next Generation) and offers improvements in speed and some new features and operators.

PHP 7

Our website has performed well during tests and the speed improvement is noticeable in its effect. There have been no problems found so far so we hope to be able to migrate over once it has been released as stable.

You can find a copy of the migration documentation over on the PHP website explaining how to migrate and any problems that maybe be encountered such as deprecated or removed functions.

PHP 7 supports return type declaration which you can use to specify the type returned by a function similar to parameter types added in PHP 5. The null coalesce operator looks to make life that little bit easier than using the ternary operator.

$var = $_GET['var'] ?? 'default value';

is the same as

$var = isset($_GET['var']) ? $_GET['var'] : 'default value';

Constants can now be arrays which is handy and there is a list on new functions added to the language here.

We plan on using these new features as we go with new releases along side running the beta version of PHP 7 on the alpha server used for local development our test environment will continue to use PHP 5 along with production until it is deemed stable.

It will be good to gain an impressive speed up with a minimal amount of work on our behalf!!

New Release: HTTPS Site Migration

Moving Over to a Secure Website

Our sysadmin has been very busy lately and has now completed the migration from http over to https which is more secure for our visitors with a secure connection being the default. The migration was quite simple because our code base does not use magic numbers or strings so all URL are references to a variable which is replace with the URL contained in the configuration.

Secure Website

Enabling a secure connection by default is the way forward so we decided to make the move over now. We use Apache SSL and SPDY as a module to help speed up connections from clients who support the protocol.

Testing has been accomplished by using a clone of the live server running inside a VM instance, we like to use Virtualbox for VMs although it is now owned by Oracle not Sun it is still open source and a great bit of software that I find very useful.

Setting Up Apache

We already have a setup for the secure site because it is used to process our payments securely although all other traffic is redirected to the non secure site.

We edited /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ssl.conf to configure the protocols we support and to disable ones which have vulnerabilities like POODLE. Here is a snipit of the configuration file.

SSLProtocol all -SSLv3 -SSLv2

SSLHonorCipherOrder on

SSLCipherSuite "EECDH+ECDSA+AESGCM EECDH+aRSA+AESGCM EECDH+ECDSA+SHA384 EECDH+ECDSA+SHA256 EECDH+aRSA+SHA384 EECDH+aRSA+SHA256 EECDH+aRSA+RC4 EECDH EDH+aRSA RC4 !aNULL !eNULL !LOW !3DES !MD5 !EXP !PSK !SRP !DSS"

Next we needed to install a copy of mod-spdy for any user agents who support it

wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/linux/direct/mod-spdy-beta_current_amd64.deb
dpkg -i mod-spdy-beta_current_amd64.deb

Our rewrite file on the non secure site looks like this now it just 301 redirects all requests to their secure equivalent.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

SPDY for Apache

Installing this has really improved our website response time and it just seems snappier than the non secure site we installed a mod-spdy package but SPDY only works with modern browser but we do not support old browsers any more so this is not a problem.

The source code for it and the packages are available and it has now been donated to the Apache foundation from Google. You can download the 64bit deb package here this is the one we used since we have 64bit Debian.

Site Config

This was simple and we only have two string representing the sites full URL one in the main PHP config file and another in the SiteConfig JavaScript class file. This approach also simplified when we moved over the domain name from www.ucarewecare.com to www.carehomes.net.

Conclusion

Porting our website code over to HTTPS has been quite a simple process in the end this was helped by us not using string literals as our URL and instead using a token which uses a value in the sites configuration so all we did was change one string and they all changed.

Remember to never use magic strings or numbers in your code and abstract away a bit because it does come in handy sometimes.

Minor Release: Improved Markup

Some Markup Changes

We have been making some small changes to the website recently to try and structure the markup at bit better and to move some content to make it less prominent and further down the page markup.

The top site heading The Care Homes Director has now been changed to a <h1> as it should be the main header for the banner section. It seems a valid thing to do since we are using the HTML5 doctype, and there is a good article covering it here.

HTML Markup

Bootnote

Soon we will be releasing an improved version of our care groups scheme allowing enhanced listing users to manage their care groups branch information and also the listing page for their care group. We hope to have an initial first version release coming soon.

New Feature Release: Care Groups

Grouping Homes Together

We have improved our data set by adding support for care groups this allows us to group homes by its owners, this supplements the type of ownership data we have.

You can find the main care groups page by following this link there is not much there at the moment but we will be adding to it as we go.

As usual we plan on improving this dataset and also make our offering in this area better than it currently is.

Care Groups

Admin Release

Behind the Scenes

With our latest release we have been cleaning up some under the hood bug fixes and working on improving our administrative features to try and make our site admin jobs a lot easier.

Major improvements have also been made to the custom CMS system we have allowing us to manage our content better as we all know content is King.

Content is King

Testimonials is going into the final stages of development now then it will be tested and released to the public and we also have the job board coming up.

New API Improvements

Better Implementation

We have made some recent improvements to our API by refactoring some of the classes, adding a JSON output writer to complement the XML writer this allows us to use either format for API output by changing the URL suffix for the request.

JSON Output

The  old map XML code has been ported over to a new GeoApi module for handling all our map data requests such as the "other homes in this area" feature or local amenities map markers which is used to display local places of interest.

XML Output

Along with these changes we have created some new DTDs which go with our XML API output, there have been multiple bug fixes along with removal of some unneeded code which has been deprecated.

Our hope is that by implementing these changes we can provide data to the public via a uniform simple to use API. This will be ideal for when we release our new testimonials feature which we plan on opening up for public use.

New Feature Release: Recently Updated Care and Nursing Homes

Homepage Listings

We felt that it would be good for our visitors and home owners if we rewarded owners who keep their listing up to date by placing their listing on our homepage. We though that the last five updates should be shown at the bottom of the content area.

You can update a homes listing information by clicking the edit homes details link which is located under the homes contact information this has the advantage that the homes information will pre-populate the form.

New homes can be added by completing this form and once the information has been reviewed by one of our administrators will be made public and displayed to our visitors.

We have found our new and update home feature has been very successful and we have only had two junk submissions so far which is quite a good rate, our admin tools make it simple to remove these entries and they are very obvious to the eye.

Soon we will be release a new service for allowing homes or care related companies to post job vacancies on our site and we plan on tying it in with our top nurses product we also have some good ideas for features.

New Feature Release: Similar News Articles

Read Similar Articles

Our latest feature release has added support for displaying similar news articles allowing our visitors to read any article which matches the keywords for the current news article. All our articles have a set of tags allowing us to search the database for matches to those keywords.

We hope this will help promote our other articles better  and allow visitors to keep current with news specific to a certain subject.

Similar News Articles

Enhanced Care and Nursing Home Accordion

Enhanced Listings on County Pages

Today we release a change to our main county pages on the website so they now include an accordion containing any enhanced listings for the county. We implemented an accordion which is collapsed on page load so we still have the county list above the fold.

We feel this improves the quality of the page by adding relevant content that is useful to the visitor but also adds another avenue of promotion to care and nursing homes which have an enhanced listing with us.

Collapsed Enhanced Listings

Expanded Enhanced Listings

New Feature Release: Mobile and Tablet News

Care and Nursing Related News

Our news system has now been ported to our mobile and tablet specific website so you can now read the latest news headlines from http://m.carehomes.net/news/ you can also visit any news categories from the headlines page.

With the release of our news section we feel value has been added to our website and we have noticed an increase of visitors which corresponds with our release. Our returning visitor percentage has risen along side so now our visitors are becoming repeat visitors while the main directory seems to be more a single visit session.

By taking advantage of Google Analytics we have been able to monitor our visitor usage which in turn helps us improve the most commonly used pages and invest our time on worth while pages.

Please remember we do have RSS and Atom feeds available for our latest headlines if you are a web master please feel free to use our feeds if you would also link back to our news headlines page it would be appreciated.

Mobile and Tablet Version

New Feature Release: RSS and Atom News Feeds

Providing Care and Nursing Related News Syndication

Our release yesterday of The Care Homes Directory care and nursing related news system we have already add a new feature in the form of an RSS and Atom news feeds allowing users and care providers to access our news directly.

If you are a care provider working in the care and nursing home industry, website maintainer or a care agency are also welcome to use our feed on their own website the links below can be used to access our feeds

http://www.carehomes.net/news/rss.php (Our RSS news feed)
http://www.carehomes.net/news/atom.php (Our Atom news feed)

These feeds provide access to our news headlines which is a collection of the 13 most recent news articles from all categories.

As one of the leading care and nursing home websites we hope this feature of our website help provide fresh content to keep our visitors up to date with current affairs. We will be writing a blog post on this release in more detail soon.

Thank You

Syndication

New Feature Release: Care and Nursing News

Providing Care Related News

Our news system has been released to the public now and we are already building a collection of care and nursing related articles in the hope that they will provide our visitors with some quality content.

Please take a moment to view our news page and have a read of our first few short articles and remember to check back soon for any updates.

We will be writing a brief overview of how we developed our news system and some of the features we have added in a future article.

News

Care Homes Directory New Feature Release

Care Homes New Features

We have been working hard on adding some new features to The Care Homes Directory and now have a new look for our basic and enhanced listing pages.

Adding a tabular navigation bar for the listing provides links to local amenities, Neighbourhood view, Street map and a form for contacting the home.

Enhanced and basic listings are pages which contain information on each home so they can be thought of as a sort of home page.

Main Page

The main page is the landing page for enhanced and basic listings and is were visitors are directed when viewing a listing from our town page. For enhanced listing we also display an overview of the home written by the contact point of the home. This allows full control of any descriptions of the service.

Details Page

Local Amenities Page

Our local amenities page is a list of local places within a few miles of the home so you can now see what kind of businesses and services are available near the home, for a full list of services please see the bottom of this post.

I have highlighted the local amenities with a red border in the screen shot below to give you an idea of how it all looks.

Amenities Page

Neighbourhood Page

We also now have a tab for the Neighbourhood page which is a street view of the homes local area allowing visitors to see the surrounding area and what it may look like.

Neighbourhood Page

Map Page

The Map page is a road map of the local area it provides some controls for viewing more homes in the area.

If you zoom the map out it will populate the map with pins of other homes near by. This also works if you scroll the map using your mouse and clicking and holding the left mouse button.

Map Page

Contact Page

The final tab is the contact page for the home, if we do not have a current email address associated with the homes contact point then no form is displayed. Enhanced listings allow home owners to have potential clients contact them directly from their listing page as a current email address for the home is required during signup.

Contact Page

Conclusion

The Care Homes Directory hopes these new features will be helpful to our site visitors when looking for a care provider. We also hope they provide some useful tools to home owners and managers to control their homes information and attract more potential clients.

Enhanced and Basic Listings

Please review some of the homes taking advantage of the new features we have provided,

• Minchenden Lodge (Enhanced Listing)
• April Park Nursing Home (Enhanced Listing)
• Farmhouse Rest Home (Enhanced Listing)
• Alexandra Park Home (Basic Listing)
• 1 Old Station Close (Basic Listing)

Local Amenities List

• bank
• beauty
• salon
• bus
• station
• cafe
• church
• dentist
• doctor
• florist
• hair care
• hindu temple
• hospital
• library
• mosque
• movie theater
• museum
• park
• pharmacy
• physiotherapist
• place of worship
• post office
• restaurant
• shopping mall
• subway station
• taxi stand
• train station
• veterinary care
• zoo