GalToGalWalk.org powered by SWX PHP, to be featured on Martha Stewart Show on Monday and expected to raise $1m.

Gal to Gal Walk 2007 powered by SWX PHP

The Gal To Gal Foundation has a new web site and online campaign for the Gal To Gal Virtual Walk 2007. It aims to improve the lives of women diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer and is expected to raise $1m. The site is due to be featured on the Martha Stewart Show on Monday, October 1st to a national audience in the United States. Oh yes, and it's powered by SWX.

(More precisely, it uses SWX RPC, with a SWX PHP back-end.)

Jon MacDonald has a case study of the Gal To Gal Virtual Walk project, wherein he explains that the entire site was built in one-and-a-half weeks.

So what was it like, working with SWX on this project? Here's what Jon has to say:

SWX is used extensively throughout the site to communicate with the back-end and database. This enabled the rapid development timeline, and made the process of storing and passing data through PHP seamless. I haven't seen any other true sites built with SWX, but rather small mash-ups and widgets, so I believe this is a first for the SWX project.

This is definitely the first large-scale web site I've heard of that uses SWX and it's great to hear that working with it was a "seamless" process and allowed the team to develop the site so quickly.

By signing up on the site and giving a donation, you get to create your own virtual Gal to join the walk.

There are over 302,400 possible combinations when creating your 'gal': 2 body types x 2 skin tones x 9 hair styles x 5 hair colors x 2 expression choices x 2 expression/lip colors x 2 eye types x 3 eye colors x 70+ outfits. Trust me, this equates to a lot of assets!

Not only can you create hundreds of thousands of unique Gals, but the scene for the walk changes every day also as the walk progresses through different cities in the US.

The background changes with each day as the walk progresses across the US. To see the progress, click on the map at the bottom of the site. Note that the walk starts on Oct. 1st, so until then all you will see is the warm-up (Day 0) and race start background. Click the book at the bottom right to learn about each city as the walk progresses.

Following the national TV exposure on the Martha Stewart show on Monday, the site is expecting heavy traffic and $1m in donations. Jon talks about the infrastructure they have in place to handle this:

The foundation is expecting $1+ million in donations during the month of October, so the site was optimized to handle the heavy load. It is being hosted on three load-balanced servers to alleviate the crunch times as much as possible.

The whole experience is built for broadband connections where the "total upfront load is about 2.3 MB". According to Jon, this meant that they "were able to load in higher-quality (and lots of) assets".

I encourage you to check the site out and participate (it's for a good cause, after all). A big thank-you to Jon also for working with SWX on this and sharing his experiences with us on his case study.

If you have SWX success stories of your own, please do get in touch and I will share them with the world on my blog and on the SWX Showcase.

Congratulations, Jon, the site looks fabulous! Here's hoping you guys reach your aim of $1m in donations.

Read more about GalToGalWalk.org in Jon's case study.

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