Sorry for the delay in getting this across, aside from setting up my task runners and migrating the database I didn't really get a chance to get stuck into the project until Friday evening!
Default username / password = admin / password
- Image processing (you'll see that post thumbnails are just left in their original dimensions, this makes me sad.)
- It was the first time I've used a task runner, and so my build process might not be optimal which I apologise for if this is the case. certainly I can see that there's no need for my components to be within the public directory
- encapsulated my controllers within the fuzzyblog namespace (they are not laravel core, and everything else is so why not those? Rush of blood to the head maybe.)
- My comments can be a little sparse when im working solo, I apologise if there is anything unclear
- Looking back through the code, I feel like it's a bit inconsistent that some controller actions respond through the model directly whereas others interact with the service layer - I think it should be all of one type, however as I am aware of the time taking to submit I'm not fixing at this point
blog contains a bower.json, package.json and gulpfile.js so that the development version can be built easily, for production version all js are uglified and concatenated into a single file and a less file is used to import all style library dependencies (bootstrap, font-awesome etc.) which is then minified and piped to a single file.
There is a .env. file that configures the database connection and app url etc, I've omitted it from the .gitignore in this case but this would normally not be added to the repo.
The database is very simple - I opted to use SQLite as it offers the greatest level of portablility, although if I were building this as a real application I would probably opt to use Postgres. The database could probably be normalized further by adding a morphable slug type as this is shared across more than one table. If I were to expand on the project further I would also introduce a role package such as Zizaco\Entrust which would add some tables to the database and greater flexibility for user roles. All migrations / seeds can be found in app/database/
The local.sqlite database file is already migrated and seeded if getting the blog up and running.
Everything related to the blog (except for views and controllers) is encapsulated within app/FuzzyBlog.
I followed PSR-0 namespacing conventions for easy auto loading.
I used artisan's controller:make where possible so that my api is clean and consistent
To help achieve a full seperation of concerns I've expanded upon the typical MVC approach to include the following:
- Presenters, so that my Models don't contain presentation logic and my views are as logicless as possible (there are a fair few if statements but i've removed most of the deep logic)
- Services, (probably more aptly named modelhelpers) these are responsible for calling the model validators, they also contain domain-specific logic such as processing file uploads. They allow me to keep my controllers logicless
View composers, exceptions, service providers and validators are also self-contained.
I've used all of the typical OO-PHP features such as inheritance, interfaces and traits where applicable
There aren't many bells and whistles on the frontend, I've used twitter bootstrap as the basis of the site as I think it's awesome, and then expanded on that with my own less file found in /public/less/main.less
In terms of javascript I used wookmark, which is a masonry plugin and enabled me to easily give the category and archive views a pinterest type feel, I've also used bootbox for some dialogs in the admin panel, it's a great abstraction on normal bootstrap modals.
I also used DataTables for the admin resource lists, it's a great library for quickly adding dynamic sorting and filtering functionality to html tables