Background

Some time ago, I was given the opportunity to take part in a project meant to benefit the masses by providing patrons with an easy way to find what they want in the bar scene. It is not about drinking, despite the name of the site. It’s about finding the best food and drink specials, social venue, karaoke stage, dance floor, or whatever it is that will optimize the patron’s night out. The opportunity has grown into a full scale commercial website known as BeerMagnet.com.

Viewing the website can give you a slight idea of the project. Signing up for a free user account will show you even more. However, there is a lot of the website that will never be seen outside of the several administrators because we created a GUI behind the scenes to administer user accounts and “hot spots” (bars); view, edit, and clear error logs; view site statistics; and perform many other administrative activities.

My Role

I was the project lead, working with several other people to coordinate all efforts including software coding, data entry, and documentation. In addition to leading the project, I

• designed the database
• wrote a lot of the php code
• wrote or co-wrote a lot of the javascript code
• defined the site’s security practices

More than 90% of the code across the entire website was written in a plain text editor, and the databases are created and queried using SQL statements that were also created in a plain text editor.

Accomplishments

Below are some of the main accomplishments of the web work. I am sure the list is not all inclusive.

• Payment Gateway interface
• Google Maps interface
• Custom javascript library, mocc_lib, which includes a great AJAX class
• Custom search engine
• A LOT of data
• Self serve user profile editor
• Self serve hot spot administrative panel for hot spot owners/managers
• Full featured sandbox for demo/trial purposes
• Sophisticated error logging logs to database or file if database is unavailable
• Custom cron jobs to notify of logged errors, expire hot spots, send emails, and more
• some Jquery integration