Can anybody suggest me some nice challenging project(website) at intermediate level in PHP?

Question

Hello,

This time i have PHP in my curriculum. Can anybody suggest me some unique challenging project for PHP that apart from regular CRUD has something else to do? The time duration for project is 8 weeks(roughly 2 months). I will be really grateful to all. If you can give me links to some nice websites then too it can be a good reference as my project is not live, it just for my college work and just for practise work. I don't know whether i should be asking this question here or not and i am not sure whether few people will negatively vote and close and my question. But i thought i must ask here.

Thanks in advance :).

Answer 1

Try to create any kind of mashup. A mashup is basically a web site that utilizes different well-known web services. Every major player has a web service (google maps, facebook, flickr, amazon, ebay, youtube, etc) and they're all free to use.

Knowing how to use web services is a very important thing these days. Also, you can create some very interesting sites in a short amount of time with web services, and PHP is great for this.

See http://www.programmableweb.com for some examples of mashups and what APIs you could use.

Answer 2

Take a look at the projects in Google Labs, dabble with the APis

http://code.google.com/more/

I tend to find if i'm really looking for a mashup, or some challenging project i'll just look at APIs and think what I could apply them to.

A few other things that might be worth using/researching for this project of yours:

• Different programming patterns
• PHP Frameworks (CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Zend)
• JSON/XML
• Auth services (such as OPENID)
• Graphing/pretty data representation - I like graphs.

EDIT:

If you're looking to learn more PHP and decide to use a framework I recommend you figure out exactly how the framework works (spend a week on it, or develop your own) when you're learning I'd say reinventing the wheel is important, to me that is.

Answer 3

You could write a news aggregator with voting possibilities.

One part of the project would be building a website presenting news. blog posts, etc. Second part would be writing the web scrapers (parsing rss feeds and popular websites).

You could integrate existing solutions and use them for authentication (like twitter/facebook/openid).

I'd advice you to use a framework to speed up the development and implement more features.