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Computer Science and Software Engineering Capstone Presentations

Summer Quarter

August 21, 2020

Xue Guan

"IdeaTrek Internship: Full Stack Development using WordPress, PHP and SQL"

(Idea Trek)

Sponsor: Roger Hunt

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Arkady Retik

Abstract

IdeaTrek focuses on creating innovative ideas. During my internship with IdeaTrek, I worked on creating an electrical car themed social networking and one-page forum-based website, which has more entertainment, high user experience and traditional forum functionalities for foreigners who have language barriers to follow automobile professional terms. The idea is to make a forum based on the popular features from TikTok, Reddit and Instagram that allows people to have more entertainment, connect to other users from same country remotely due to Covid19, and solve their problems easily at the same time. It is an agile project using WordPress, PHP and SQL and it plans to be done by August 28th, once we finish the first run to the market with a prototype, we will collect feedback and make an improved version. Through the project, Ideatrek created a great environment for me to learn how to design and develop a full stack web application as well as to communicate with the tech support of various tools when we had technical issues. It started with user story and functional, non-functional requirements, then we used Wix to do a quick layout design. Based on that, we developed the forum with plugins using WordPress, and used CSS to customize it. The client makes ajax calls to the API (written in php) which can then read/write data from/to MySQL database using a php library and fulfill the request. There is currently no product like this out on the market, so creating this was innovative. This would allow foreigners, who has language barriers explore solutions and network with other users remotely due to Covid19, entertain each other with fun auto videos when they don't need to solve any problem, and solve the problems effectively. Overall, it is not only providing a community to have Q&A but also entertainment and social networking. More personally, the significance of this project is that it taught me about UI design, php, database management, and communication skills, and the process of developing a web application in an agile manner.

Updated August 20, 2020, 00:30