Pierre Fredenucci
Chronicles
What: Design and building of a website from scratch
When: January - March 2015
Skills: HTML, PHP, CSS, MySQL
Where: Ecole Polytechnique
Concept
We created a sharing platform of critic reviews for movies, literature and music. Indeed we noticed that there were no places where the common consumer of art can openly express himself about a piece he enjoyed or not. While he can give his advice by commenting specialised websites, there are no spaces dedicated to these users who have valuable things to say. That is why we created Chronicles which enable anyone to share his reviews of movies, literature and music without being a specialised journalist. With Chronicles, users can publish reviews that will be put at the center of the stage.
Building the website from scratch, we added numerous features to give the user a better experience: a profile page (with optional profile picture), upload a picture associated to a review, possibility to modify or delete reviews, admin rights, a search tool, comments, likes and numbers of views for each reviews, following and messaging system etc.
I carried out this project with Lilian Darracq and we worked with Eclipse. During three months we followed modules teaching us how to code and design a website. We learned important computing languages: HTML, PHP, CSS, MySQL and a little bit of JavaScript. Our main objective was to deliver an operational website with all the features mentioned above. While the next steps would have been working on the design, we effectively presented a working prototype of our concept.
Apart from time constraints, the main challenge was coding on the same project within a group of two. To overcome this we usually worked together in the same room and often shared our code via USB or email so that we do not lose a piece and understand everything. Of course, commenting every relevant pieces of code we were writing was essential for the understanding of the scripts.
Process
Screenshot of the main page displaying the latest reviews published