Avanis

Avanis was a social network for the Spanish agri-food sector, backed by Santander. Not a portal with a forum, but a platform where farming professionals posted, commented, followed each other and checked prices and subsidies.

Building it on Liferay Community Edition meant standing up over sixty custom OSGi modules: the community feed, user profiles, polls, following between members, industry events and the search. Persistence was solved with Service Builder, Liferay's data-access layer, which generates the model, services and API from a definition.

My contribution focused on two fronts. The first was the second version of the post editor: two-way conversion between BBCode and HTML, text formatting with bold, italic, underline and strikethrough, emojis translated into Spanish, link insertion, and image and document uploads by dragging onto the editor. It's the piece the user interacts with every time they post, so every bit of friction shows.

The second was performance: database query optimisation, WebP integration for images and adjustments to avoid unnecessary servlet and JSP reloads.

Also the Google Tag Manager instrumentation on the market-price, events and subsidies sections, which was how the team measured what content really moved the community.

The platform is no longer online. The home page comes from the Internet Archive and the community area from screenshots taken at the time.