Colial

Color + Social = Colial. A social platform where status updates are just colors.

This was a small project I did for one of my courses to demonstrate competency of PHP. Thus, this project is definitely feature-incomplete. My hopes are that this project can later inspire me or someone else, or as a learning resource.

The development of this project was an avenue for learning myself, in that I was able to expiriment with technologies I had been watching for a while, but never had a good use case.

See the frontend readme for a few more screenshots.

Backend

The backend is a custom REST-like API structure written in PHP.

For more information, see the backend readme.

Frontend

The frontend is a React application written almost completely in JavaScript (with React/JSX and modern JavaScript extensions, via Babel).

For more information, see the frontend readme.

Going Forward

If I am to revisit this project in the future, there are a few different ideas I feel are worth considering to make this project better:

Using an actual PHP framework, i.e. Laravel
Writing the frontend in a different framework, i.e. Angular
Put in place a linter to keep code consistently formatted
A more thought-out design
Adding more features (of course)

Running

0. Prerequisites

To run Colial, you must have any kind of setup that includes:

A relatively new version of PHP
A running MySQL server
The PDO extension w/ the MySQL PDO driver
The mod_rewrite Apache module

This setup can be easily achieved using XAMPP.

Also, to bundle the frontend, you must have:

a recent version of Node.js (v6+)

1. Building the Frontend

$ cd frontend/
$ npm install
$ npm run build

And that's all there is to it! The build npm script just calls webpack on the project.

Output files will be in the dist/ directory in frontend/.

2. Copy Files to Your Server

Copy every file in:

backend/
frontend/dist/

to your server. With XAMPP, this would be the htdocs directory.

3. Setup the Database

A description of the (notably small) database structure can be found in backend/internal/doc/databse.md. I appologize for not providing a simpler method of recreating the databse, i.e. a .sql file. The MySQL databse should be named colial.

4. Run Your Server

Make sure Apache and MySQL are running, and you should be good to go! Simply access your server (http://localhost/) and you should see the application running.

clavin / colial