The UK's largest directory of creative professionals. In 2010 I inherited this project with a heavy legacy codebase spanning many years of far-from-perfect development (by which I mean it kept randomly crashing a few times a day). I acted as technical architect in a freelance capacity, and lead developer of the main website.

After fixing the urgent issues, I gradually moved all sections over to a code library of my own, writing a ton of custom object-oriented code in PHP to provide scheduled functionality, utilise 3rd party APIs, e-payments, email campaigns, and statistics. Creativepool was relaunched as Version 3 in 2013, changing metal in the process to a much more recent hardware. I'm proud of its stability.

Features

• 150,000+ users
• Object-oriented PHP 5.3
• Replaced legacy PHP 5.1 codebase.
• Own framework (Underscore v1 ORM)
• Bespoke content management system
• jQuery for frontend interactivity and async content
• E-payments by Netbanx
• Broadbean-style API
• Social networking features
• Redis caching layer
• Background workers in PHP
• Text extraction & indexing of pdf, doc, docx, rtf CVs.
• Antivirus scanning via clamav.
• Sphinx search
• Cron-based server maintenance
• push to stage and live via rsync
• versioned in SVN
• project-managed in Mantis

• documented in MediaWiki

• Activity stream system by Lee Briggs.
• Frontend by Matthew Bell
• Site UI/UX designed in house at Creativepool

Tool summary

PHP MySQL Apache RHEL, Redis, Sphinx; jQuery, ajax+json, XML & Broadbean REST;

CLI: svn, rsync; ghostscript, antiword, clamscan, mplayer, pdftotext, swfrender, unrtf, openssl