About two years ago, a guy by the name of LD came to me asking if I was willing to re-write a web site that I was a member of. I had an idea about how to go about it but the one thing that held me back from initially saying yes was the fact that I never developed something as large as the site that I was going to re-write.

I finally said a week later that I'd do it and started re-writing all of the PHP code needed for the site to work. Mind you, I had no idea how the Admin stuff worked since I wasn't an Admin at the site. I need to wing just about everything when it came to this part of the site.

I had no original code, except for one module and that was the password module so that I could keep using the old encoded passwords.

One of the things that I had to learn to do while writing this site was how to use MySQL efficiently. I had to learn how to write concise, clean, and optimized SQL statements. I also learned how to use JOIN queries and sub-queries as well.

I can't say that I wrote all of the site's code for the site relies heavily upon several open source modules and frameworks, one of the biggest two modules was Pear DB, HTMLPurifier and Smarty.

Darkscribes is a fully dynamic, database powered, PHP generated web site. It features a lot of Javascript use, a lot of AJAX elements, multi-user authentication, ACLs, and RSS feeds. The RSS feeds are based upon a custom-written PHP module that's based heavily upon Smarty.

Never before had I written something as large and as complex as Darkscribes is. A lot of people I talked to asked me why I didn't just modify an existing framework such as Drupal or Joomla! to do what I wanted to do. Yes, I could have done that but that would never have lead me to learning how all of these web technologies can be put together to form the Content Management System or CMS that powers Darkscribes.

If you want to take a look, here is the link.