Summary
LifeSimple was a project as ambitious as its name. They wanted to build a single app for finding all local, community events in your area. We were asked to help with their ongoing development of their MVP.
Jumping in midstream
The LifeSimple team had already decided to build their MVP using Zimbra, a Java based web client that primarily operated as an email client. We were asked to update the interface to emphasize the calendar and events features over the email capabilities and to introduce the ability to search for events. We were also tasked with making as few changes to the core structure of Zimbra as possible. To accomplish this, we focused on building custom Zimlets, Javascript extensions that can be added on to Zimbra. Once we made the necessary core changes to set the events page as the main page and deprioritize the email features, all other visual and feature changes were made with Zimlets.
Improving the import process
After improving the user interface, the LifeSimple team requested that we develop a better way to import events from community websites. Given that most of these sites had no formal API connection, we got to work constructing a more elaborate solution. In the end, we developed a Java-based Zimbra extension that could crawl any URL it was provided and search for events, utilizing a custom calendar event recognition algorithm we developed. Thus extension was then made available to LifeSimple users as a new event import tool. Now users could easily import their community events just by copying the event page URL into the tool and clicking “import”.
The Handoff
As our team had been working directly within LifeSimple’s code base, there was no code handoff required for this project. We did, however, provide detailed documentation on the custom Zimlets and the Event Importer to the LifeSimple team so that they could continue to develop and manage the tools further.
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