Meeting Planner began as a coding tutorial called How to Build Your Startup in PHP. Basically, I scribbled ideas for making scheduling a meeting easier and reducing the hassle involved. I wanted to get rid of the back and forth email and text messaging to common in picking times and places. I pitched Envato Tuts+, a programming tutorial website, the idea of building the scheduling startup around a tutorial.
If you’ve ever wanted to know how to program in PHP or write code in a framework, this is a great series to start with. Our meeting scheduler is written in the Yii Framework, a Model View Controller (MVC) framework for PHP. And, there’s also a lot of Javascript and JQuery and third party open source components. If you’re new to Yii and want to start there, I also wrote a Yii Programming Series for Tuts+.
Here’s a screenshot of the landing page for the Meeting Planner tutorial series:
Building Your Startup With PHP
Here’s a list of all the articles in the tutorial series behind the beginning stage of scheduling meetings in Meeting Planner. Following these articles you can basically learn how we created the beginning of our meeting scheduler:
- Getting Started
- Feature Requirements and Database Design
- Geolocation and Google Places
- Localization With I18n
- Access Control, Active Record Relations and Slugs
- User Settings, Profile Images and Contact
Details - Scheduling a Meeting
- Scheduling Availability and Choices
- Customizing the Meeting View
- Using the Mailgun Store(): A Temporary Mailbox for Your App’s Incoming Email
- Delivering the Meeting Invitation
- Email Commands
- Simplifying Onramp With OAuth
- Exporting iCal Files into Calendar Events
- Choosing and Configuring Production Hosting
- Collecting and Managing User Reports and
Feedback - The Open-Source Foundation Behind Meeting Planner
- Refining Email Templates
- Responsive Email for Gmail
- Notifying People of Meeting Updates
- Delivering Notifications
- Preparing for Reminders
- Dynamic Ajax Forms for Scheduling
- Sending Reminders
- The Dashboard Foundation
- Improving the Mobile Web
- Issue Tracking and Feature Planning
- Security Basics
- Ajax for Meeting Times and Places
- Invite People via URL
- Increasing Security
- Preparing for Text Messaging
- Automatic Time-Zone Detection
- Advanced Scheduling Commands
- Requesting Scheduling Changes
- Meetings With Multiple Participants
- Completing Group Scheduling
- Importing With the Google Contacts API
- Error Logging
- Running Multiple Domains
- Designing a RESTful API
- Bootstrap Your Home Page
- Leveraging Bootstrap, Ajax, and jQuery
- Using Routes for Schedule With Me
- Leveraging Crowdfunding
- Securing an API
- Approaching Major Feature Enhancements
- Using Faker to Generate Filler Data for Automated Testing
- How to Build a User Tour With Shepherd in JavaScript
- Programming With Yii: Generating Documentation
Obviously, there’s a lot of functionality we built after the tutorial series, which does not have an accompanying article. The schedule a meeting wizard is one such feature. Site map generation and indexing is another. But there’s so much material to start learning from here. I hope it intrigues you to check it out.
Stop doodle-ing around and try scheduling a meeting with us.
