Filmlounge

Project Background

Filmlounge.dk was a project I started with some friends who work in the movie distribution business. The hope and dream were to create a streaming platform of high-quality movies to be rented and streamed. The platform was centered around lists of movies in different categories. The lists could be something like; Oscars Winners, Best French Movies, Cannes Winners, and so on. Users and admins were able to create and share their playlists and other users could follow them. The lists were meant for inspiration between users, but also as a tool for the editors and admins to draw attention to selected movies.

My role was simple; Write code - Develop the product. I was not involved in the marketing or anything related to the movie selection.

Tech stack

The site is built with the ruby on rails framework and with a heavy custom design. I choose rails for the project, because I wanted the development speed to be as fast as possible, higher productivity, but also because it was a good fit. All the requirements were something that rails could handle without any issues.

Design & functionality

A great friend and brilliant designer (Jesper) made a beautiful and professional custom design with a unique visual identity.

Users

The site had a login and different user roles. Normal users would be able to use the service (rent movies, create playlists, etc). Admin users were able to create new movies, adjust users, make public playlists, and all other admin actions. I used Devise to handle users, cancan to administrate the different user roles, and active admin as admin panel.

On every poster/movie the user had the option to add the movie to a playlist or create a new playlist with the selected movie. It would send an ajax request and avoid reloading the page.

A global multiple model search with autocomplete was one of the essential features. Users could easily navigate the content of the site. The search was both for movies, playlists, actors, and instructors. A query would return results from the different content types.

SEO

Another very important area for this project was the SEO strategy, both in terms of the technical SEO, but also content-related SEO. The hope was to somehow rank high on google with both movies and the playlist. So if a user would search for "oscar movies", filmlounge would turn up in the search result. I will not go through the details, but I ended up with a good score on the most commonly used tools to measure SEO performance.

Other features

• I added impressionist gem to track how many times a movie/playlist had been viewed and used this data to present the 10 most popular movies/playlists
• Mailchimp integration for the newsletter
• Custom 403 and 404 pages
• Facebook login (or connect an account with Facebook)
• Option to follow playlists
• Public and Private playlists
• Editorial features, like top carousel and lists on the front page