QuantPedia web application

Problem

The client approached us with a functional solution, which was unfortunately not scalable and did not reflect the direction in which the client wanted to develop his business. It was a .NET-based custom CMS.

There is a shortage of .NET developers on the market and rewriting old or somebody else's code is simply not challenging enough for developers.

Assignment and First Steps

• Simple content and design management. An open platform with an emphasis on speed of development, scalability to grow and evolve with them into the future and maintenance of an optimal budget. How did it turn out and what was the crucial parameter?
• QuantPedia clients come from a financial environment; therefore, security and privacy are crucial for them. Security is not something that people commonly associate with WordPress. Not to mention the unique know-how that QuantPedia has stored directly in the database, which represents practically their only business item and competitive advantage. We did not have a single security incident during the two years of operation. How is it possible? We will be glad to talk about the details.

Solution

We built the platform on WordPress as working with it is simple and fast. WordPress makes it easy to customize and manage content and design. We used Pods.io to implement the strategies and WP All Import to import the original database (hundreds of articles and strategies, each with dozens of parameters).

We estimated it would take a few weeks to develop QuantPedia, but even with WordPress you sometimes come across anomalies and specifics of the project (especially the missing documentation). Thanks to StackOverflow, we successfully dealt with anomalies. The huge amount of information that the developers had gathered over the years supported our work.

Visualization was a challenge, but we did it. Imagine charts full of correlated information, but displayed in a readable form. The content of these charts can be tailored to different subscription packages applying strategy filters. No simple pie charts and exponential curves.

Bezpečnosť

Samostatnou kapitolou bola bezpečnosť. Keďže klientovi klienti pochádzajú z finančného prostredia, bezpečnosť a diskrétnosť je pre nich kľúčová. Opäť - bezpečnosť nie je niečo, čo si ľudia bežne spájajú s WordPressom. Nehovoriac o unikátnom knowhow, ktorý má klient uložený priamo v databáze a ktoré predstavuje de facto jeho jediný obchodný artikel a konkurenčná výhoda. Za vyše 2r prevádzky sme však nemali ani 1 bezpečnostný incident. Ako je to možné?

Použili sme custom made WordPress stack, postavený na Bedrock.io
V praxi ide o upravenú inštaláciu WordPressu, kde pluginy, rodičovská téma aj samotný WP sa inštaluje pomocou composeru + má upravenú adresárovú štruktúru. Deployment pomocouv Gitu a Capistrana. Žiadny downtime pri nahrávaní novej verzie, či už témy alebo pluginov/jadra. Možnosť sa bleskovo vrátiť k predchádzajúcej verzii v prípade zistenia akéhokoľvek problému. Konfiguračný súbor nie je súčasťou repozitára. Prístupové údaje pozná len webmaster, nie je možný únik hesiel napr. Pri strate pracovného notebooku.

Conclusion

We helped the client build a full-fledged company with several full-time employees. At the beginning it was just a single-person startup. The number of subscribers to online platform QuantPedia has multiplied. Owing to the simplicity of content management and design, the client has meanwhile managed to launch several new related products at minimal cost.