Websites

TimBoekTU

TimBoekTU is a website where people can go to find people on their campus selling their old university books as well as sell any books they have. I created it since when first coming to TU Eindhoven, I couldn't really understand how something like this didn't already exist.

It's unique in that it has no user accounts, so it involves the absolute minimum level of effort needed to find or sell books. Simplicity is a virtue.

It's made with the Python Django framework and open source. It's my first project using that framework, and I must say, I am incredibly pleased with Django and highly recommend it over other similar MVC web frameworks.

References

Pheide.com (Scratch)

This is where you are. I've named the mini-CMS I built to run the site Scratch because I wanted to see what it was like to build each part of a CMS. It's written in PHP and MySQL. After logging in, the admin user edits each text section (either here or the sidebar) by double clicking on it and entering text with HTML tags. Tabs can be added, removed, edited, or reordered. The only part not editable from the web interface is the picture links at the top (for those I still need to edit the HTML and PHP manually). It also sports a pretty URL parser I wrote (which was, by the way, harder than I expected).

On the backend it uses object-oriented PHP in an MVC pattern. The model part of MVC is done through repositories which can find Page and Tab objects. A Blog class extends the Page class, which can have Post objects added to it instead of a main text. The architecture was in part modelled after the FLOW3 framework, but I imagine it's pretty typical for any MVC web frameworks.

All in all I'm pretty pleased. Now that I don't need to SSH to my server, I actually update my website sometimes! And of course it's open source.

References