SitterCMS

Who was the site for?

This website was for my graduation project. We were given two months to create an application from what we learned. We spent the past two years creating android applications. Somehow I convinced my small group that I would build a custom CMS written in HTML, CSS, PHP, and JS from scratch.

I love creating websites. We had a few website classes but a majority of our curriculum was about Android and Java. Before college I made websites so those HTML and CSS classes were easy. Do you know what wasn't easy? Learning PHP a few months earlier than we're supposed to.

At this time I just built my personal website, the blog and all, and I was fully up to the challenge to build a content management system. We were supposed to learn more about PHP in our bachelor's program (my school closed by the way) but I decided for whatever reason that I wanted to be two years ahead.

Everyone was unsure of what they wanted to do but I was dead set on making a website. Some of them joined which was great; I gave them roles. One guy designed the SQL database. The other people gave me suggestions, drew out flowcharts and wrote the essays.

And me? I designed the UI, constructed the frontend and built the backend.

What did I learn?

I learned how to work in a team. I've always been the type of person to want full control of everything. Especially during group projects because I find that people get lazy. However, I want to overcome that mentality. I'm no expert on everything. I'm not the best writer, developer or designer. Being surrounded by people who all want to be successful, who all wanted to graduate and are helping one another, it was just a great feeling. In future teams that I am part of I want to be surrounded by supportive and skilled people.

I learned how to send emails. In the employee area, there is a form where you can input an email address and write a message. This, in theory, would be used whenever the babysitter needs to bill the client.

I learned about SASS, SCSS, and LESS. I prefer SASS and SCSS; it seems the majority of the design community would agree with me as LESS loses popularity. SASS does what LESS does but with less syntax. SASS is great for large projects such as this one since we were constantly changing colors and layouts. There is so much you can do with SASS but for this project, I just scratched the surface.

What did I use?

I used Atom and Blisk. For prototyping the UI I used my whiteboard and my school's whiteboard. The site was written in HTML, SASS, PHP, and JS. The visual pages for "children, parents, and viewers" are handwritten in HTML. The events page is driven via PHP and SQL queries although. The sections of the website that uses PHP and SQL extensively are in the employee only areas. SASS was very important in this project. I was able to change colors sitewide, update layouts and more all from separate files, but when compiled, it was one minified CSS stylesheet.