Last night Dan Fairs pushed the latest version of the django powered Swoop Patagonia site live. The site has several new content management features created by Dan with the help of Ben Mason allowing swoop staff to create and manage content in a more flexible manner and has been re-skinned (by yours truly) to use a new design created by the talented designer Ming Cheung. Another successful team effort!

A couple of months ago, freelancers Dan Fairs, Dan Hilton and myself discussed the idea of teaming up to offer services beyond those that we could offer individually. We came up with the identity Foundry, and decided that we wanted to work on interesting projects, mainly using the Django framework.

No sooner had we come up with the idea, I was approached to build a website for new adventure travel company swoop travel, and I decided it would be an ideal project to work on as a collaboration. It has worked out really well and "phase one" of the site went live yesterday, providing information and filtered searches about trekking in patagonia, specifically trekking in the Torres del Paine national park.

This was my first Django project, and although all the heavy lifting was done by the two Dan's while I concentrated on the front end, it was a great introduction to working with the framework. One of the big wins was having the admin site in place very early on in the project allowing all the trip and operator information to be input as we built the site. It was also my first proper introduction to GIT source control, which worked out well for distributed collaborative working.

Looking forward to the next phase of this project and more collaborative projects!