A few months ago we launched this app already but it got wiped again. Now after some refactoring and redesigning on our side and after some changes on the Facebook side (event creation no longer spawns a status update!) the app is live again still powered by Symfony2.

The concept is simple really.

• A cronjob fetches the broadcast data from some source
• It then queries the Facebook Graph API for all new shows in order to get some text and image information for it.
• Finally the single broadcasts get stored in a MongoDB database

The App itself then shows the TV program (selected German channels only) for the next week.

Apart from reading through the program you can click on “Merken” for each show in order to store that particular broadcast as an event in your Facebook profile event tab.

That’s all it does right now which kind of explains its experimental character. But you can probably see where this could be going.

The fun part of developing this was on the technology side. I was able to play around with Symfony2, Twig, Assetic, HTML5 boilerplate, Sass/Compass, CoffeeScript and jQuery. And I am still thinking about generating those seven pages statically on the server and then serving them from a DropBox account.

The app is still in beta status so please be gentle. If you experience any problems with it please report them to me with as much detail as you can.

If you’re on Facebook you can check it out here and while you’re at it you might want to become a fan of the new test.ical.ly page.

Assetic · CoffeeScript · compass · Dropbox · Facebook · html5 · html5boilerplate · JQuery · SASS · Symfony2 · Tv-Programm · Twig

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