there it is: http://www.tripmondo.com
It's a private project I have invested a lot of spare time in (too much if you ask me
). Though still having a few bugs and limited functionality I finally feel good enough with it to make it publicly available. I nearly worked 9 months on the current state. Not being much of a coder I had to learn a huge portion of everything and this is the result (except for the HTML frontend and server set up, this is a one man show). I probably rewrote everything twice and at the current state I would probably set it up completely different... but hey, Shakespeare already wrote "Joy's soul lies in the doing - things won are done" 
Tripmondo.com is a CMSMS based site aggregating information about travel destinations from various sources. It tries to provide structured views on travel guides, local weather, nearby attractions, videos, twitter, wikipedia and events and some more platforms. It still has some flaws here and there, e.g. I didn't yet check for html/css validity and a lot of the content intended to be there isn't yet there, however, feel free to use the site as you like.
So the site tries to give you some info where to go and what to do in single places. I think this may be useful for people who know they want to travel somewhere but not quite where exactly. Here, Tripmondo can help someone to filter
So far, it is more of an experiment than a profit targeted consumer site. Some templates are not yet completed and error checking isn't working in every instance (so you might be presented with a white or empty or half-way rendered page at times).
The sites uses a lot of adaptive navigation elements and template mechanics and remembers the locations you have last seen and will try to always provide you with related links and relevant content (e.g. you have looked at attractions in Germany near Berlin, so when you switch to the travel reports, it will show you a guide for Berlin ... and so on).
The hierarchy you see isn't actually really there - except for "service" section which is real cms content. Everything else is either coming from external services via REST and XML/JSON APIs or from own plug-ins accessing further databases.
Amongst others, these are features I'm especially proud of
:-> Gecoding Service: internal Geocoder based on a DB with ~5m entries to look up places and provide aliases. It allows to search for airports (not shown yet), nearby places, country information reverse geocoding and a few more functions. It includes the use of the Google REST geocoder for validation of some entries
-> The "Trip Explorer" that aggregates most of the data: it works ok in nearly most cases and should only have problems when you try to target very small towns/villages or when you are deep in the far east (where English translations of names are rare). Since it aggregates most of the data close to real-time, especially these pages can be slow upon request.
-> Search: based on the regular search module, the search is able to provide content from the other data sources as well. it is even capable of capturing typos in location names and still provide at least some content in that case.
-> Cloud based content and advertising snippets with conversion monitoring and automatic decisions: pieces of content will embedded into pages based upon tags and context sensing (though there is no advertising at the moment implemented). These can be stored as pages in a special branch. These elements can also automatically be tested to their conversion and the site will decide weather to use them or not in the future depending on how they performed.
-> Comprehensive rating plug-in: a plug-in that allows for an AJAX bases rating mechanism as well as providing the functionality for the internal conversion monitoring.
The biggest problem as of now is the performance. The site is running on a dedicated server with a lot of RAM and CPU power, all kinds of possible accelerations and cachings. Still, you might feel it is somewhat slow. This is cased by the aggregation of data and limitations of the current system architecture as a lot of the data is loaded upon page request (here some flexible and adaptive scheduled API management would be cool). So it's not the CMS that is slow (a naked CMSMS runs like hell on the machine) - it's waiting time for the responses of other servers.
Another problem was matching the data. Some platforms provide coordinates, some location names and sometimes locations have different names (e.g. Hamburg and Hamburgo, though both mean the town in the northern part of Germany).
I'm curious to know what you think of the current state of the project. What do you like, what do you dislike? What feature would you expect etc pp.
Best regards
Nils
(big thing for me)