Introduction
XFlora is an online community for gardening. The vision is to popularize gardening and make urban life full of greenery.
Together with entrepreneurial partners, we started from an initial idea and went through user research, needs analysis, product design, and development, continuously launching web product features and operating content across multiple channels. After several rounds of validation and iteration of the business model, we ceased further investment due to the small market size.
Product Logic
Demand Scenario: Provide gardening enthusiasts with features such as a plant library, flower event records, group discussions, gardening manuals, and personal homepages.
Growth Logic: Use the content obtained from UGC, and push it through multiple channels such as WeChat, Toutiao, Weibo, etc., submit to search engines for indexing, and form a closed loop of "information collection—content processing—consumer traffic attraction."
Design Style: Prioritize functionality, showcase the beauty of plant photos, and minimize unnecessary visual distractions.
Development Section
Development Framework: The web framework is based on Drupal, and the frontend framework is based on Bootstrap3.
Backend: Over 150+ third-party modules were used. The main work involved searching, evaluating, debugging, and connecting various modules, with some small modules being developed manually.
Frontend: Used custom theme templates for overwriting, initially adopting the Zen theme and later switching to the Bootstrap3 framework.
Development Work:
- Definition of data tables for entities like plants, photos, flower events, groups, books, mainly based on the CCK series of modules.
- Development of functionalities like the plant library, flower events, groups, favorites, mainly based on the Views series of modules + theme overwriting.
- Integration with Solr search.
- User registration, verification, posting, favorites, and other process optimizations.
- SEO keyword analysis and configuration.
- Integration with Qiniu Cloud CDN.
- Integration and customization of CKeditor.
- Theme template overwriting and frontend development.
- Server environment configuration, Mysql cache configuration.
- Integration of the email system.
Operating Environment:
- System: Alibaba Cloud ECS
- Software: LNMP + Solr + Drupal 7
- Others: Qiniu Cloud CDN, GrowingIO Data Monitoring.
