Lewiston Morning Tribune
About the Project:
I was hired as an intern for the summer of 2008 at the Lewiston Morning Tribune. There were two of us and we were tasked with helping create projects they wanted done but didn't have time to do. I was given a few projects including - making modules for the CMS, creating an automation system for digitizing print ads, and creating a business directory.
I can not remember exactly what CMS was used but it's of little relevance. They started out with a pre-canned CMS and hacked it into what they needed until it became a custom CMS. I had to make a few administration modules for site maintenance through the web portal. All of it was done in PHP and SQL and actually was a lot of fun. Making these modules that even editors and columnists could use was quite challenging at times. All and all it was one of my favorite projects though.
Next was a mamoth of a project; the digitizing of print ads. All print ads are scanned in to PDF form and stored on the network. I was to coordinate with IT to automatically grab the print ads running that day into a file and transfer it to the server I formatted and set up in UNIX freeBSD. I would use SED to massage the file with regular expressions until I could easily parse it with PHP. The PHP page would parse the file, transfer the PDF's, convert them to JPG, write them to the database and transfer them to the web server. This sounds straightforward but it wasn't. After this was done we had to create a frontend that was searchable through the database and had the functions that administration wanted. We encountered numerous bugs and had to remake entire sections a few times.
Lastly was a business directory that I was unable to finish before I left. They currently have another programmer working on it. The business directory allows all area businesses to have a presence on the website. There are premium features if they pay for them but all businesses are entitled to a free basic page. The page directs users to information about the business ranging from basic information, contact, services, prices, hours, pictures and location, etc. This includes an administration area that each business has to log into to be able to edit their information. I created the frontend and was creating the admin area when my internship ended.
Tools Used:
- All coding was done in Notepad++
- HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, SQL
- Photoshop for picture manipulation
- Used and created modules for the CMS
- BSD UNIX
- ImageMagick and Ghostscript for PDF manipulation
- SCP for copying files over to the web server
- Adobe Illustrator
Additional Information:
I believe PHP was about 80% of everything I wrote the entire summer. I got quite a PHP workout!
