TripCatcher - travel easier now

I think the feeling of insecurity and some uncertainty before the journey is familiar to many of us. And with the painful search for the right information and drawing up the route of the upcoming trip almost everyone came across. So I often had to experience similar feelings. It was necessary to answer many questions: where to live, how best to move, where to spend time and what to see. But the most interesting thing is that after answering all the questions and, being already somewhere far away, I wanted to easily and easily share with friends the impressions of each day of travel. I did not manage to find a convenient service combining all the above functions. So the idea was born to create a platform that includes everything you need to travel ...

And, holding the mouse and keyboard with a shovel and an ax , my partner and I began to implement our plans.
Today, after several months of hard work, we present our project to you.

About the project:

TripCatcher is a travel platform with elements of the blogosphere, social network and web 3.0. Each user can create or add content to the site, influence the rating, express their point of view and, of course, communicate with other people.

Planning and creating a travel itinerary

It is clear that you can go on Google maps to create your own map there and mark your route on it. But we always wanted to turn this route into something more alive, similar to a travel diary, where at any time you can leave a short note or describe last week’s impressions in colors.
And now each TripCatcher user has his Travel blog, where he can keep a full travel diary, share photos and impressions. You can add any user as a friend and read his new posts in his news feed.
')

Search and add information

We have paid special attention to the structuring of information. If you want to find information about a city or country, you just need to enter the first few characters of the name and you will see all the information collected by our community. You can easily see travel blog entries about this place, photos, weather and climate data, read articles in the guidebook and questions on the forum. As you may have guessed, almost all the information (with the exception of the weather, leave us space for imagination) you can add or change by yourself to make the project even more useful.

Some technical data:

The project is hosted on 3 servers, written in php. The logical architecture is based on the highly modified CodeIgniter assembly (The choice for this framework fell because of its speed). As a request handler, the standard scheme nginx + apache2 + mod_php is used (at the moment we are thinking about switching to nginx + PhpDaemon). MongoDb is used as backend storage (separate server + replication to backup machine).
Background tasks - Gearman. Cache - memcached. The principles of working with the cache are described in detail here .
If the habrasoobshchestvu will be interesting - a separate cycle of articles will be written in more detail about all the details of functioning

Summarizing what was said:

Currently, approximately 50% of the plans have been implemented, but for the start of the project, we found this to be sufficient. This means that new features and services will appear almost every week. In the near future plans to complete the development of the forum and communities. By the way, about the latest news of the project, you can always find out by visiting our Facebook page .

We also decided to coincide with the launch of the project “The Best Travel Blogger 2011” competition, which we plan to hold annually. Read more about the competition here .

We will be very grateful for your opinion on the project and suggestions.
Thank!

_{(Picture above - poster for the cartoon "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs")}