Mad Events – Development Project

Live Website

http://madevent.andreavillegasma.com/

Role

Team Leader, Developer (Create event feature and its complementary feature Invite Guests)

Technologies used

PHP, PhpMyAdmin, MySQL, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap

Description

During my second semester at Humber College, my teammates and I created a PHP based application that we called Mad Events. Mad Events is an event planning application that facilitates the process of planning, inviting, and sharing events. Through our website, a user can create a profile from where they can create and manage various events. Open events or events that are in the stages of planning allow users to invite their friends directly via email; friends can also reserve a table for the event directly through our app. Additionally, once an event has passed, users have the option to close an event and allow it to go public. With a public event, the creator of the event can share photos to share its success, and other users can view, like, and comment on the event. Thus, through this very simple application, we aimed to simplify the event planning process to allow users to focus more on the enjoyment of the event rather than the planning stages.

Making the Create Event Feature Scalable

The create event seemed like a simple feature at glance but as the main feature, it needed room for expansion so the other features could co-exist. Thus, through the process of creating it, I came up with the open and closed events options. By classifying events as open or closed, I created a clear divide on the purpose of each event. Open events were only viewable by the user, could be edited, and allowed users to invite friends; while closed events were restricting for sharing photos and comments. Through this interface and content structure, the application was able to efficiently run its various functionalities cohesively.

Preview Active and Closed events dashboard

Friends vs Guests

On the other hand, the invite friends feature required a very different approach; although it had a simplistic set-up and could work on its own easily, I wanted to make sure the way of inviting guests made the most sense and was the easiest for the user. Thus, I created the idea of friends vs guests. A user would have a list of friends from which they could choose to invite to an event. That way if a friend was being invited to more than one event, the guest information did not have to be inputted twice. Through this process of content management, it was not only easier and quicker for users to invite their friends, but from a content management perspective, the system had lesser repetition, and guests per event could be easily tracked.

Preview Adding and Inviting Friends