MisterPHP

Three days ago I received my copy of Inc magazine. I was scanning through it and low and behold there is a 1/4 page blurb about Pancake App! Phil is a leader within the CodeIgniter community and a member of the Reactor Team so I was very excited to see this. After doing some research I found that we have never done a showcase on Pancake App so this entry is to make that right. Congratulations to Phil, Lee, Bruno and Adam! You guys deserve the recognition that Inc. Magazine is bringing you.

Tell us a little about Phil and Lee.

Lee Tengum is a PHP developer with a keen eye for design. I am a long-time CodeIgniter user and contributor who also likes to build distributed applications. We make a good team, as I couldn't design a website to save my life and I have plenty of experience building backend systems.

How did you two come to work together?

We've been working together on various projects for years now after we crossed paths on the CodeIgniter forums back in 2007. Lee built a very simple CMS which I ended up buying and that CMS became the great grandaddy of PyroCMS. Since then there have been a few client projects we've worked on and while Lee is a talented programmer we generally split the work as Lee on UI and myself on the main development. About a year ago Lee started building a simple internal application to collect payments from a difficult client.

After showing it to a few different people they were interested and wanted more features added in, which was when Lee decided to migrate the code to CodeIgniter and get more people involved. Throughout Pancakes lifetime it has had contributions from several prominent CodeIgniter developers and the team currently consists of Lee, Bruno De Barros, Adam Jackett and myself.

What can you tell us about the app in general?

I like to describe PancakeApp as a freelancers sidekick. PancakeApp handles the full project life-cycle from Proposal to Payment. You can draft Proposals and send them to your client, who can then accept or reject until an iteration is agreed on, all from within the app. That saves a lot of PDF emailing! With the Proposal agreed upon you can make a Project, add Milestones and Tasks and even track time against each task. You can generate invoices based on the Projects which automatically take all your tasks and tracked time into consideration, so your Project is instantly turned into line items and totals. You can of course also create invoices from scratch. The invoices are sent to the client who then has multiple options of paying based on what you've enabled in the settings, so you can take money via PayPal, Authorize.net, Bank Transfer or even accept cash; instructions will be listed on the invoice.

You might be thinking of a hosted service that sounds similar too, but PancakeApp is not a hosted service. It's a single payment to download the software and then it's all yours to go on your own server. No worries about other companies having your client details, no monthly fees, just one payment.

There is one last thing that makes PancakeApp awesome: Auto-updating. If you turn this feature on in the control panel, PancakeApp will upgrade in the background as soon as we release a new version. You don't need to keep logging into your FTP server to replace files or worry about running an upgrade script, we send out a HTTP notification to installations to grab the new files and CodeIgniter Migrations take care of the database changes.

I know you are on the Reactor team but when building something major like this you can build it using anything. So what was your major consideration in using CodeIgniter for this?

The most obvious answer would be that both me and Lee know the framework well and have been using it a long time, but the main reason is that CodeIgniter is currently the most simple and most portable framework around. While some frameworks undergo large rewrites to implement the very latest PHP 5.3 features, CodeIgniter maintains backwards compatibility for older servers meaning it is perfect for distributed applications in two ways: 1) We won't have to re-write PancakeApp in a year, it has already gone from 1.7.x to 2.1.0 without a hitch, but also 2) it will work on PHP 5.1.6 servers. While as developers we have probably all upgraded any servers in our control to PHP 5.3 and are trying to convince our clients to upgrade theirs, when you release a distributed application like PancakeApp it has to work in as many places as possible and CodeIgniter makes that incredibly simple. After-all if we used a PHP 5.3-only framework and 30% of servers are still on PHP 5.2, we've just reduced our target market by 30%!

What is next on the plate for pancake app? Any additional functionality you can tell us about?

There are some brilliant features coming for PancakeApp at the moment. We've just finished up some improvements to User Management and Permissions meaning that you can add plenty of users with varying levels of access, and there are plans to improve the existing REST API even more to allow for more integration with other services.

Do you have any other information you'd like to share with the community? Tips from this project you'd like to share? Lessons you've learned?

The API is something I really wish I'd focused on more at the start. It is a well-known developer habbit to build an application or website then add the API in as more of an after-thought. While we are happy to have an API if we'd build it first and used it as a core for the system (much like Twitter does for example) then we'd have been able to make it much more powerful and have web features and API features keep up with each other without duplication of effort.

A positive lesson we learned was open, honest, personal customer support. While PancakeApp was still in its first year we had a few users on Twitter and in various forums make some complaints that certain features were not included. While some developers would take a defensive position, we admitted there was room for improvement and engaged them in conversation. Those users who complained all now have a PancakeApp license and have become some of our best evangelists. It's thanks to users like this that PancakeApp has started to spread and we even got quite a big mention in Inc Magazine this month!*

Posté le 26/01/2012 sur codeigniter.com .