Green Lemur Ltd - PHP development
Green Lemur are incredibly proud to announce that Nigel is now a Zend Certiied PHP engineer. We've even got a sparkly new badge on the site to prove it! We've been working with PHP for a while now (see below for details on the kinds of things we've built), but will now be bringing this side of our work into focus as one of our key skills. PHP is an ideal language to program in for web applications and websites for a few reasons:
- It's easy to use, but powerful so you can get something up and running fairly easily, but there is no compromise on programming methodology for projects that are more complex. PHP has great object-oriented support so you can build maintainable, scalable and safe software with it.
- It's free! PHP is free software, meaning it costs nothing to use but, more importantly, there are no restrictions on how you can use it. If you need PHP to do something that it currently can't do you can add it yourself.
- It has a great community with lots of support so it is always easy to find solutions to problems.
- It's fun to use which should never be overlooked as a positive point for any computer language
The sub-sections below show some of the projects we have built using PHP.
Contacts database
A local charity approached us and asked us to build them a contacts database to manage the people and institutions they deal with. There was quite a complicated set of links between them all and one of our main tasks was to make sure that all of these were dealt with by the program, providing a quick and easy way to add, change and delte contacts through a web interface. There is also a reports interface for the database that allows staff to retrieve specific information from the database in Excel format.
Content management
We have built a framework for developing websites using PHP that we can use to speed up our website creation. This means that we can respond to clients needs more quickly, but also we can extend the framework as we move forward to include new functionality. As the framework has been built using object-oriented methods, any future changes can also be provided to existing sites with a minimum of fuss.
Task management
We have developed a task management system that we use in-house to manage clients, projects and tasks. Loosely based on David Allen's Getting Things Done model, this has proved to be very successful and will hopefully be rolled out for clients to use in the near future.
File and workflow management
Given Nigel's background in publishing, one of the areas we are always keen to work on is workflow management. Formal systems for managing documents, tasks and schedules can be very expensive for small companies, both to buy software and to train staff in using it. Green Lemur can help by analysing the workflow you need to make your staff work efficiently together, and building a framework to support this.