[Postorama]

About Postorama

Why?

The driving force behind Postorama actually was the inadequacy of most online postcard sites - banner-riddled, cards would expire after a few weeks, horrible MIDI music in the background, register-before-you-can-see-your-card. Postorama does electronic postcards as they should be - an image file, as e-mail attachment that you can keep as long as you'd like, print out, forward to friends, use as desktop background. Plus it's easy to use, for the visitor as well as for the admin.

History

At the end of 2001 the first, yet-unnamed version of the sofware was written. It was employed for the sending of electronic postcards at www.turfpost.de since January 2002, and it ran for close to three years without problems or errors. In January 2005 it was replaced by the current version of Postorama - a rather big change. For the end user, things look mostly the same, but there's actually tons of new features. Most importantly, it's a lot more flexible and can be used for many sites with no changes to the actual code. A listing of sites which use Postorama to send digital greeting cards can be found on the main page.

Developers

Postorama is a team effort - Maike Hanneck does concept, design and editing, while coding and administration of the server is Felix Schüren's job.

Features

Real images: Not just the card's motif, all preview images are actual renderings of the finished card. You always know exactly how the finished card will look prior to sending it.
Multilingual: Currently, all the texts are availble in german and english, more languages can be added easily once the translations are done. No code changes are needed to implement the additional languages.
Special characters: Multilingualism also means being tolerant towards foreign-language special characters.
Never lose your input again: Postorama uses sessions internally, so you can change your card's motif even after previewing it, taking your text with you to the new motif.
Clearly laid out structure through themed sections: Even with many images the screen doesn't get cluttered due to the themed sections admins can organize the images in.
Preview images for themed sections: Adding an image to a section automatically recreates the section preview image. There's multiple options on how the preview images should be arranged, with configurable background color (even transparency) as well as configurable font color and style.
Versatile card "backside" configuration: The card's "backside" (the part that gets written on) is styled by the respective site admin. Fonts, colors and text positions can be individually chosen - with custom true type fonts, if needed. This means that a vast range of styles can be created - check out the sites using Postorama for an idea on what can be done with it.
Small files: Both thumbnails and the ready-to-send postcard are reduced in file size by deleting unnecessary data from the image file. This, however, has no negative effect on the visual image quality, which remains high.
Multiple backsides: Real postcards can't do it, but Postorama can: The backside can be swapped with one that you like better. Of course, your preview will update to reflect the change.
Easy administration via browser: Postorama sports a web interface for the admin to upload/style/delete/organize images and backsides.
Compatibility: Many different graphic formats (e.g. PSD, BMP, TIFF, JPG, PNG, GIF) can be uploaded through the admin interface and will be automatically converted to the internally used formats (mostly PNG and JPG).
Flexibility through style sheets: Postorama is mostly raw functionality, the actual design is realised through CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). This means that Postorama can be integrated into most any modern site's layout.
Security: To make sure that the personal touch created by the Postorama postcards keeps its magic, Captcha-techniques are being employed. This basically means: before actually sending a postcard you have to pass a simple (for humans) letter test. No worries, no human has failed it yet!