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2010 marked the release of our ground-up rebuild of the Liberal Democrat website platform, this time built on top of Symfony, and this kept us busy most of the year. Folkestone web designer Dane Williams helped us put together a great and varied choice of new designs for the platform including custom designs for several MP clients and we migrated all existing customer content from the old system.
The sites provided custom mobile and accessible views, rich text editing, Facebook and Twitter integration (back when this was possible), in-browser image editing, and graphical reports.
Tim spent much of the year knee deep in construction material rebuilding our office in a historic building on Sandgate High Street, expertly aided by Darren Briddock. It had recently been a newsagent and once upon a time a stationers and a tobacconists but had been closed for over a year and it was great to bring it back to life. As I recall, every floorboard lifted revealed another problem that needed fixing.
We celebrated by watching Gary Numan sing in the rain and with an opening party where there may have been plenty of leftover canapes but we bravely worked our way through all the Kentish sparkling wine and Gurkha beer.
2008 was an incredible time to be at Prater Raines, a year of events that honestly we are still struggling to live up to 15 years on.
The pinnacle of which was obviously working alongside Joanna Lumley on the Gurkha Justice Campaign where we built a bespoke online petition which ultimately received nearly a quarter of a million signatures and changed the law. In the meantime we plotted in Joanna’s summer house and we wowed the crowds of schoolchildren visiting the Houses of Parliament. I think it genuinely took some of the Lords down a bit to realise they weren’t the most famous people in the room. And I will always have with me the memory of watching the web server logs with trepidation throughout Joanna’s appearance on Al Murray’s Happy Hour on ITV one Friday night in October.
Peter Carroll has detailed it all in his book, in which I think I appear as a footnote to something like chapter 11 as “Tim Prater’s colleague was also in the room”. But it really was an excellent and surreal part of my life.
We incorporated as Prater Raines Ltd and started to provide technical consultancy in addition to developing and hosting web sites. Our first contract lasted two and a half years, working with magazine publisher IPC Media in a hand-picked team to rebuild their content management system for all the magazine websites including Country Life, Decanter, Marie Claire, Wallpaper*, and Ideal Home. This was my first introduction to Symfony and I quickly fell in love with the framework. It may have helped that it was a beautiful commute on the riverboat from the Isle of Dogs to the South Bank and the other contractors there were all great people.
The experience would later become the inspiration for a similar rebuild of the Liberal Democrat website platform. (Although, as I recall, the IPC database layer used Propel which I hated, which may also have kickstarted my love for Doctrine!)
We moved from renting servers to colocating our own equipment in a data centre on Marsh Wall in the Isle of Dogs. It was close enough to my house that I configured everything at home and cajoled a friend into helping me carry the servers there on foot. Once installed this increased redundancy, performance, and resilience for all of our sites. Thus Asquith and Gladstone began a so far uninterrupted trend for naming servers after Liberal leaders, and by the middle of the year they were hosting well over 250 Lib Dem websites.
After months of hard work we launched our first e-commerce site for Lib Dem Image, official party supplier of branded campaign materials. They’re still with us to this day although it’s now WooCommerce on WordPress. At the time of launch, open source e-commerce applications such as osCommerce did exist but were pretty basic, and I had experience developing bespoke e-commerce applications so building from scratch made sense.
Our main focus this year was the continued growth of our Lib Dem website platform and by the end of 2004 we reached 175 customers including regions, MPs, MEPs, associated organisations like Liberty Network and ALDC, a portal for returning officers and the London mayoral campaign. This meant we needed our first replacement server which I was proud to tell Tim had 2 CPUs, 80GB of hard disk, and a whole gigabyte of RAM.
WOOOOOOOOSh [said the server]. Nice looking kit. — Tim Prater
2003 was a year of remarkable growth for Prater Raines. We built bespoke website developments for the New Politics Network, the campaign for Votes at 16, the Parliamentary Candidates Association, and events website The Full Effect. But it was the runaway progress of our Liberal Democrat website platform that most proved the business would be lasting and successful.
Tim and I first mooted the idea of working together to build an affordable website platform for Liberal Democrat council groups and individuals in October of 2002. But we’d already known each for other a little while before then.
A recent talk at Symfony Online guilt-tripped me out of the “var_dump() and die()” debugging style once again and back into using XDebug. It’s clearly the right solution to debugging in PHP and Derick is a good friend so I often feel guilty that I’ve fallen out of the habit. Coincidences being what they are, it really came in handy that I’d set it all up again when I had to diagnose a problem with one of our APIs this week. You can’t really var_dump() in a subrequest.