Product Catalogue

This product catalogue was technically multiple projects combined together.

First of all, there was the front-end catalogue itself which was built in React. This was used in two places - a custom WordPress plugin for the client's existing WordPress website and a new Symfony application for use in a B2B context.

The portal, along with utilising the React catalogue, also offered a basket/cart system as well as the ability to place orders and view invoices.

The underlying data was stored and accessed via the final part: a headless API. This was a third Symfony application, albeit a barebones one, that fetched data from a third-party service hosted within a private network and accessed via SOAP. The data was then cached locally to the API application to prevent potential traffic spikes on the private network that was not setup to handle it.

The biggest challenge with this project was having to initially interface with multiple third-party APIs. In the end the project eventually settled to using just one of them in the end but a lot of work went into accessing both. The final one that ended up being used was also quite old software and would only accept requests in the form of SOAP requests which is a challenge in itself when compared to more modern approaches!