Elevent

Elevent was a social, visual platform to build creative projects and events from design through to completion. It was aimed at life events such as planning a wedding, redecorating a house, expecting a baby, or travel. There were tools for capturing images or notes from any site on the web, organising and categorising projects, sharing your projects with friends to collaborate with, task management and budgeting tools, and private messages between friends or professionals. Due to a number of factors, the project had to change course and has evolved into a yet-to-be-released product.

Elevent Inc.

Laravel

This was by far the biggest freelance project I have worked on, and I barely slept for 6 months! It was a fantastic experience working for a startup based in the heart of San Francisco. I was responsible for the entire database (PostgeSQL), backend (Laravel) and frontend (jQuery) development. We set up a small server cluster on Amazon EC2 to host the site, S3 for media storage, and Heroku for a cloud PostgreSQL instance.

As all projects were private, permissions were very important so that only you and your team could collaborate together. All objects within the system had either individual or project-level permissions, such as images, messages, tasks or budget items. The integrity of this data was achieved at the database level as much as possible, with higher level business rules within the application code.

A great feature was the ability to import images or text notes from anywhere on the net. I wrote a javascript bookmarklet which would overlay an image chooser to the site you were currently on, and clicking on an image would then import it into your specified project. You could also capture a note at this point too, rather than an image.

Project images and notes had comment features, voting, and sharing abilities. Most of the interface was done via popup iframes, which enabled some really good real-time functionality. Within each site section, most actions were performed via AJAX, and all actions were recorded on an activity feed for other project members to keep track on what had happened recently.

All-in-all, a great site with huge potential.