WHAT IT IS

Catalogit is a program that allows you to submit your written music into a database and then access what music you have, and where you have stored it through practical Gui interfaces, mostly forms.

Because of the nature of a database, the user can access music with several different types of criteria including Composition Name, Composer Name, Book Title, Difficulty Level, or Type of instrument, for example. Depending on what is searched, the Catalogit database returns a list of items that match your search and the information related to that item.

WHAT WAS USED

• • Programming Languages – HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL and a little bit of JavaScript

• • Frameworks & Libraries – Bootstrap, Materialize

• • Technologies – GitHub, GitKraken

• • Programs & tools – Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, VS Code, Workbench, PHPStorm

• • Website builders – No builders for this project. I used WordPress for my Portfolio site, but linked to Catalogit as a subdomain.

PURPOSE

This project came about out of my need to catalog my library of music. As a music teacher I needed to be able to access my music and put my hands on it when I needed it. A digital ‘card catalog’ so to speak.

Using HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, Bootstrap, Git, a little JavaScript and Adobe Illustrator I created a functional Data base that includes Sign in, Passwords, Permissions and Administrator qualifications.

One of the things I learned with this project was how to use PHP and MySQL to enter and access Database information. I learned to write Queries and how to set up a data base.

When starting this project, I started out with everything on one page to keep it simple. As it progressed I ended up with many pages and a much larger project than I first expected. While I started out small enough, I didn’t have the experience to be able to plan out the whole project in my mind before starting. I certainly learned from experience to see the end from the beginning as much as possible.

Because of this project I was able to revisit the life-cycle of a web page again and again. Understanding this life-cycle helped me to plan my site, and especially, to debug my code. I found that in order to understand what is wrong, I needed to really understand what was supposed to happen and where in the life-cycle the error occurred.

This project also forced me to learn to use the debugging tools available to me. I was able to use PHPStorm and VSCode to debug when needed. I learned about setting break points, checking my variable values and following my code through step by step to discover where the code was incorrect and where exactly the code no longer produced the result I hoped for.

This was my first opportunity to use Bootstrap and I gained a functional understanding of how Bootstrap works specifically, and Libraries in general. I was able to style my forms, my pages and my navbar using Bootstrap and some additional CSS.

This was also the project where I started using Git, GitHub and even tried out GitKraken. Here I learned command line and was able to use Git to create saved versions of my work as I went along.

It was an ambitious project for my first serious attempt at a portfolio project. I’m so glad I worked through it to the end. I think that, while it could still use tweaks and even added functionality, it turned out to include some very important foundational understanding, and provided experience as I was able to use the same processes again and again. A great project for my progression in web development and database proficiency.