M.A.
LaundryBase
- Table of Contents
- Brief Background
- Client Side
- Admin Side
- Final thoughts
Background
After going through a 6-week training on the fundamentals of web development at the end of 2018, I had to come up with a project idea and work on it in order to get my certification. Turns out my instructors were more particular about my ability to work with PHP, than they were, with the front-end. So I came up with a simple idea.
Imagine Mr. Bernard has a laundry business that has expanded to multiple locations and branches. He wants to be able to manage everything from his Headquarters, and with the aid of the internet. Can you come up with something for him?That's how LaundryBase came about 💥Client Area
The client area was pretty straight forward. My instructors, wanting me to focus on the back-end, advised me to use a simple front-end theme design and get to the PHP part quickly (time was of the essence!) I went with their advice and picked a one-page theme from W3Layouts. I would come to regret this decision as I matured in web development. Even though I customized it greatly and added more pages, I came to realize that one of the drawbacks of using any theme is dealing with updates to the libraries and frameworks on which it is built.
Who still uses Bootstrap 3.3? Hellooo??
The most significant things were a laundry request form modal, as well as a login modal for repeat customers. Once logged in, the customer is able to view his previous laundry deals, the company's price listing as well as an Add-to-Cart Price Estimator.
The Admin Area
Now for the fun part:
- The admin is required to
- Login
- Receive notifications for incoming requests
- View the entire laundry records
- Validate requests and approve pickup
- Assign the laundry to a specific laundry branch, based on location and proximity
- Generate tags for each laundry deal to enable tracking
- Manage the contacts and status of the various branches
- Monitor each deal assigned to each of the branches
- Manage and update the status of each laundry deal
- Monitor each deal per client until successful return.
- Of course, log out as well.
Final thoughts
This was a really good project for me to develop as a beginner. There were so many gotcha's and hurdles along the way. From learning how to select all rows in a table with one click to leveraging AJAX to create a seamless operational flow, this project kept me fully engaged and ultimately helped me fall in love with PHP.