Coilover is a car enthusiast community web application. It was created to meet the needs of my final year project at Plymouth University.
Overview
The idea was to create a web application that would meet the needs of car enthusiasts. With the research conducted, it became apparent that car enthusiasts conducted the following actions:
- Socialise
- Event manage
- Discuss
These things could be met with the following base concepts and functionality:
- User management
- Event management
- Forum
With this, requirements were formed and an application was built to satisfy the respective requirements. It was built using PHP and MySQL and the PHP framework Codeigniter was used to speed up development time. Also HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery were used as well as a variety of libraries where necessary.
The design
The key requirement for the design of the application was for it to be simple and intuitive and look great! This simple feel creates a much more usable system instead of the more complex looking designs which can make simple tasks difficult.
Before the application was decided upon, I already knew that it needed to be responsive. This helped with the designing of Coilover because it needed to be kept simple for mobile devices.
The technical
The key requirements set before the application had been researched or even decided upon were:
- Model-View-Controller architecture
- Responsive design – “Mobile-first” or “Progressive enhancement”
As stated above, the application was built using Codeigniter and other technologies which included:
- HTML5
- CSS3 – LESS CSS pre-processor
- Javascript – jQuery
To complete the application within the time allotted and to a high quality, the following applications and frameworks were used:
- MAMP
- Sequel Pro
- Github
- Sublime text 3
- LESS.app
- Responsive.gs
- Pickadate.js
- Pickatime.js
- Google Maps API