Evolution | Theme Generator

Evolution Distribution offers, amongst other services, GDS (global distribution system) connectivity, channel management and call centre reservations management to the hotel industry.

Over the course of several years being involved in various projects for Evolution Distribution, we've worked within a team using both a .Net, Windows and php, Linux environment.

Two of the major projects we worked on were a Booking Engine and an associated Theme Generator.

Theme Generator

Prior to having a theme generator, theming each booking engine took on average a day. This was cut down to under an hour by having a comprehensive theme generator built on top of custom code as well as jQuery Themeroller themes.

Both front- and backend was built entirely bespoke, using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL and jQuery UI. As jQuery Themeroller, at that time, did not offer exporting themes of previous versions, we have converted one of their themes into a templated css file which is then rendered by php to export a customised CSS file, but using the same version every time. Theme images were remotely fetched from the live Themeroller site, using curl, and packaged in the correct folder structure and then zipped server size. The theme could then be uploaded to a booking engine and unzipped on the server to install it.

Content editors could create duotone colourised social media graphics by picking a colour and the server would generate a tinted image using GDlib to mimic a multiply effect, similar to that found in Photoshop.

As a sales tool and a visual guide for copying themes for a new client as a starter base, we've used PhantomJS headless browser to batch fetch different versions of the booking engine and to take a virtual screenshot to save to disk and display in a list on the theme generator back office.