WebPattern was my graduation project for the web development track at ITI in the summer of 2020. The brief was a blog for posts about web technologies; the part I added was moderation. Registered users write posts and comments, but nothing appears publicly until an admin approves it. The project scored 100%. I published and tidied the code on GitHub in late 2021.
Features
- Public blog: posts by category, per-author pages, and full-text search.
- Registration and login for readers who want to post or comment.
- Comments on posts, held in a queue until approved.
- Admin panel with its own layout: manage posts, categories, comments, users, and the admin’s own profile.
- RTL-ready styling with both LTR and RTL Bootstrap builds included.
Why plain PHP
The track taught Laravel, but the graduation project was built without a framework on purpose. Doing routing, database access with MySQL, sessions and authentication by hand meant I understood each of those problems before a framework solved them for me. When I picked Laravel up again a year later for Hobbies, everything it abstracted was something I had already written once.
Structure
The public site is a set of PHP pages, index.php, post.php, category.php, authorPosts.php, search.php, sharing includes/ for the database connection, header, footer, navigation, sidebar and login handling. The admin panel lives under admin/ with its own includes/ and functions.php.
Looking back
There are things I would not do the same way now: business logic in page files, no migrations, and hand-rolled sessions. But the moderation flow, the ownership rules and the schema were sound, and building them without help is why the later, framework-based projects went quickly.
The repository has run instructions.