NYCPHP Meetup

[inforequest]

Brian O'Connor gatzby3jr-at-gmail.com |nyphp 04/2004| wrote:

>Hi I've been working with PHP now for close to 7 months now, and I
>feel the biggest obstacle for furthering my knowledge is lack of
>projects / sites to create.  I've already worked with MySQL a lot, a
>little bit of PEAR, and worked a bit with OOP.  I was wondering if
>anyone had any suggestions for projects that I do, or a strategy that
>I can use to learn different styles of php.  Thanks.
>  
>

Many people have enjoyed building forum software as a means of learning 
programming. Since the specifications are pretty well decided already, 
and there are projects to examine and compare your work to, it is 
educational. Since it is something that people actually use once they 
reach a basic level of utility, it is also kinda fun to develop and 
improve over time.

Take a look at invision power board as an example of a PHP4 solution 
that serves it's user base well. You can use it and play with the source 
to your heart's content.
Take a look at phpBB and all of the security alerts released over the 
past 2 years.

Also adding role-based user authentication to any of these systems (or 
any CMS for that matter) is educational and useful. For example, 
integrating p_auth from NYPHP with a multi-product website (say, for 
example, a Mambo CMS portal with InvisionPowerBoard as a forum) in a way 
that is both modular and able to survive upgrades, would be challenging 
and useful.

-=john andrews