6 ms·

Ask HN: Give me some PHP project or web app ideas

41 points by gembird 13y ago

vtempest 13y ago
http://www.freelancer.com/jobs/php/ http://www.freelancer.com/jobs/php/
NicoJuicy 13y ago
I have like 5 a day... So i don't think it's hard ;) Also, ideas are very subjective :)
comicjk 13y ago
My way of learning a programming language is always to write a chess program in it (this is probably why I haven't learned any languages which don't encourage state). A multiplayer chess site would be a fun and challenging project.
- cgag 13y ago
  I think you should check some of those languages out. Chess is used as an example in the Joy of Clojure, and I've seen it used to teach Haskell as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScS8Q32lMxA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScS8Q32lMxA (note, you can't really see anything here unless yout put it in HD and view in full screen).
jtheory 13y ago
What makes a project/webapp idea well-suited to PHP? It might be better to ask about your interests, your experience, etc.. Presumably you've branched off from coding basic CRUD apps into something more specialized; do you have expertise (and contacts, domain knowledge, etc.) you might want to leverage in a new project? Or do you want to start a side project to build more expertise in X? What do you want out of this? Suggestions for finding (and validating) ideas for new webapps/projects are all over; you might check into those.
- aoloe 13y ago
  PHP is wells suited for software that you want the users to install on "their" server without requiring any server configuration skills. Two simple projects I'm needing: - A Tumblr like app where I can post / tag / search the link s I stumbled upon in my daily browsing (with screenshots?). - A secure but simple commenting engine that I can attach to any of my pages (spam / attacks detection; confirm / delete from links in mails). Of course I need them as free software. And I'm probably going to work on them soon.
  - nathancahill 13y ago
    1. Check out clippy.in (http://clippy.in/ http://clippy.in/) 2. Why not Disqus?
    - aoloe 13y ago
      As said above, PHP is good when you want something on your own webserver and you don't want your system administrator skills to be challenged. In both cases, I want the software to run on my own server.
dutchbrit 13y ago
What are your hobbies/ambitions?
krapp 13y ago
PHP forum scripts are mostly horrible, out of date and bug-ridden messes. Make something simpler and better that's not a service.
- mcintyre1994 13y ago
  If this is actually a problem you currently have, I've heard great things about FluxBB[0], it's built on Laravel and also powers the Laravel forums. [0] http://fluxbb.org/ http://fluxbb.org/ EDIT: Its alpha 2.0 is built on Laravel and is a complete rebuild.
  - krapp 13y ago
    To be perfectly honest, I think it's a problem for the PHP forum space in general but it's one I don't have time to try solving on my own (not admitting i'd succeed.) Fluxbb looks pretty nice though.
  - dylz 13y ago
    I don't see a single hint to laravel in the download[0]? [0] http://fluxbb.org/download/releases/1.5.5/fluxbb-1.5.5.zip http://fluxbb.org/download/releases/1.5.5/fluxbb-1.5.5.zip
    - mcintyre1994 13y ago
      http://fluxbb.org/about/future.html http://fluxbb.org/about/future.html Sorry, I guess I was mistaken - the currently alpha FluxBB 2.0 is Laravel, the current one (1.55) is a fork of something else.
  - Keyframe 13y ago
    It's still an old forum-like idea. I built an almost feature complete reddit clone (with some HN ideas along the way) in Laravel over the last month or so. I did it so that I can extend it into direction I need it down the road. We're launching in a week or so and my hope is that we will open source it for others to use as well.
gembird 13y ago
thinking about some AI technologies like Natural Language interfaces, intelligent OCR scanners, video crawler with using machine vision .... etc
- ohashi 13y ago
  Well if you like working with natural language. As far as I know, nobody has ported Natural Language Tool Kit (NLTK) from Python into PHP. I've ported small parts to suit my needs, but I am sure a lot of PHP developers would love having access to the whole thing directly.
  - Implicated 13y ago
    Oh the spam that will ensue if/when this happens.
- vikp 13y ago
  I've been bouncing the idea around in my head for a while to predict the weather in an area from a photostream (ie flickr, twitter, etc). More brightness -> hotter is a simple correlation, but you could extract a lot of interesting image and meta features, I am sure (for instance, maybe people take less indoor photos in the summer). This is more of a "fun" project in realtime, but historical weather data is actually very valuable for things like energy price prediction, and is pretty hard to get. I don't know what the market is like, but there is almost definitely one (I would be a customer if the data is accurate).
wickedOne 13y ago
though i agree with the comments that there's not really an idea restricted to php (jtheory) and your interests would be good to know (jtheory, dutchbrit), i throw in a wild idea as you didn't provide those… an application in which you keep track of your fridge's content (throw a cam driven barcode scanner in there) and suggests meals to cook based on the lowest investment (stuff not in your fridge) taking into account the store closest to you (can throw a little location based feature) your favourite meals sorted desc based on a custom rating (client specific rating db?)… should keep you busy for a while? B-)
actionscripted 13y ago
Find some WordPress bugs/issues/features and start hacking away [1] or find another open-source project to contribute some PHP work to. [1] http://codex.wordpress.org/Developer_Documentation#Contributing_to_WordPress http://codex.wordpress.org/Developer_Documentation#Contribut...
nate 13y ago
My favorite method for generating ideas is this: 1) Find a task I have. If I want to make money later from this idea, this task should probably be something I already pay money for, but if I just want to make my life easier, than forget the money part. My credit card statement is a great place to look for the money making ones. Once I have the task... 2) List out all the steps this task has. Be as detailed as you can. 3) Figure out how to remove as many steps as possible. Seems simple, but I don't see people doing this very much. Instead they focus on making something because it sounds cool or is going to be the next Facebook for people who use Groupon. OXO is one of my favorite examples of doing this. They make household goods. 1) Task: they studied the tasks people have in the kitchen. They watched how people cooked and baked using measuring cups. 2) Steps: one of the weird steps people have in cooking with measuring cups is when they lift the cup to see the water level against the cups ruler. They would do this 4 or 5 times trying to get an accurate amount of water in their cup. 3) Remove: they figured out they could add the measuring cups ruler to the top of the measuring cup so that people could see the measurement while they used the kitchen faucet to add water. They no longer needed to lift the cup up to read the level. So simple, but they shaved off those 4-5 extra steps, and they sold millions of their new measuring cups in 18 months. They innovated on a measuring cup. Pretty inspiring when you think of how long measuring cups have been around and how simple they are. There are so many newer more complicated things around us today that could use the simplification above.
- byoung2 13y ago
  I saw a good example of this at the LA Car Show yesterday. The new Honda Odyssey minivan has a vacuum cleaner built in to the cargo area, with an extendable hose that can reach all the way to the driver seat. Such a simple idea, I can't imagine how no other manufacturer ever thought of it before.
  - jliptzin 13y ago
    What about that great feature where accidentally leaving a cabin light on completely drains the battery so that you can't start the car? Why do so many cars still allow this to happen? I'm no electrical engineer, but it can't be so hard to measure battery life and automatically cut power to the cabin when it gets below a certain threshold.
dysoco 13y ago
You can probably do a simple Twitter-like application, it's simple CRUD and shouldn't be difficult (It's used both in Rails for Zombies and the Rails Book as example iirc) A simple blog engine isn't complicated either.
- yareally 13y ago
  Redis has a good basic tutorial up for building a Twitter clone with it and Php. Doesn't get into doing comet or web sockets, but it covers the foundation stuff. http://redis.io/topics/twitter-clone http://redis.io/topics/twitter-clone
BigBalli 13y ago
Try this method (for mobile apps): http://mobileappchat.com/mylyrics-giacomo-balli/ http://mobileappchat.com/mylyrics-giacomo-balli/
drizzzler 13y ago
I've got a near fully built front-end that needs a back-end. The project is in the travel industry. It's a lot simpler than AI, video crawling, etc that you mention, but it's straightforward and ready to make money. Ping me on Twitter if you're interested.
MonkoftheFunk 13y ago
I had a similar post, has some links to app ideas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6067537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6067537
sz0ka 13y ago
Write a service for people who got the same issue like you: A web(app|page), where people can submit their computer problems like "I need an application, that scans my calendar from <insert calendar provider here> and alerts me in my browser ten minutes before the event comes up". Programmers than could just pick a task from it and post the solution. The whole thing can be expanded to the maximum like payed work, featured idea's, collaboration / team finding based on activity stats .. you name it :) I hope this helps you a bit.. ./sz0ka
- neil_s 13y ago
  I wanted to do this, the most similar thing I've found so far is Assembly Made (https://assemblymade.com/ https://assemblymade.com/). It's like Quirky but for software.
X4 13y ago
For MONEY, or NOT? If not, I'd say create a webpage for a charity organization that cares for the environment or children or poor people etc.
jpatapoff 13y ago
I find that it's better to work on a project related to something you're passionate about. Otherwise a couple weeks will go by and you'll have a hard time continuing to work on it. If you want to do something audio related, you can use an API that I built out http://audiour.com/api http://audiour.com/api There are a couple things I want to rework before officially releasing it into the wild, but you can start using it now if you're interested.
puppetmaster3 13y ago
One project would be to learn another programming lang so you know something other that PHP. Same advice I would give to Java or others.
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  Great. Now he knows two different languages and still has no ideas on what to use them on. Terrible advice. The correct time to learn a new language is when your current one isn't meeting your needs or when you've completed enough projects to have learned as much as possible from your current language and can start bringing in ideas from others. Endlessly learning new languages and never using them is completely backwards.
  - scarecrowbob 13y ago
    Just to offer an alternate perspective, I am a developer who spends most of his paid time working on PHP projects, either on a bespoke framework used by a company I work with and a whole lot of WordPress (I'm not a fan, but it is very easy to get well-paid remote work in this system). In the last couple of years, I have learned a number of other languages and frameworks, mostly whatever the "hip" folks are using (Zend, RoR, Django, Ember, Backbone), and of these the only thing that really is useful on a day to day level has been the python scraping framework, Scrapy. Each of these systems has brought me new ways to think about PHP and Javascript code that I never would thought about if I was solely intent on solving the problems I had at hand as best I could in the PHP idioms used by WordPress and this bespoke web framework. For instance, I certainly wouldn't be as comfortable with the map functions if I hadn't done just that little bit of playing Haskell that I did. So in my case, learning other idioms for programming, even those which I don't apply directly, has been tremendously useful in understanding better ways to work with the systems that I have to work with in a day-to-day situation.
adamzerner 13y ago
A web app that plays music (could just be youtube videos), and makes smart ratings and playlists for you based on how long you listen to your songs. The idea is that if you listen to a song for 20 seconds, you don't like it as much as if you listen to it for 2:30. From this data on how much you like songs, you could even get into better predicting of which songs you should try (like Pandora does).
- paromi 13y ago
  a nice music site, but without the ratings www.groovevibe.com
inafewwords 13y ago
Web app to generate useful ideas for web apps based on user interests
sirsar 13y ago
An RSS reader that flows all the feeds together, but weights them based on frequency. So your once-a-month blog is above your webcomic is above your HN feed.
alb000 13y ago
read the book "The Millionaire Fastlane" by MJ Demarco. after you have read it, your ideas will flow (I think) and you will have a clearer vision on what you really must pursue.

41 points by gembird 13y ago

vtempest 13y ago

http://www.freelancer.com/jobs/php/ http://www.freelancer.com/jobs/php/

NicoJuicy 13y ago

I have like 5 a day... So i don't think it's hard ;) Also, ideas are very subjective :)

comicjk 13y ago

My way of learning a programming language is always to write a chess program in it (this is probably why I haven't learned any languages which don't encourage state). A multiplayer chess site would be a fun and challenging project.

cgag 13y ago
I think you should check some of those languages out. Chess is used as an example in the Joy of Clojure, and I've seen it used to teach Haskell as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScS8Q32lMxA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScS8Q32lMxA (note, you can't really see anything here unless yout put it in HD and view in full screen).

jtheory 13y ago

What makes a project/webapp idea well-suited to PHP? It might be better to ask about your interests, your experience, etc.. Presumably you've branched off from coding basic CRUD apps into something more specialized; do you have expertise (and contacts, domain knowledge, etc.) you might want to leverage in a new project? Or do you want to start a side project to build more expertise in X? What do you want out of this? Suggestions for finding (and validating) ideas for new webapps/projects are all over; you might check into those.

aoloe 13y ago
PHP is wells suited for software that you want the users to install on "their" server without requiring any server configuration skills. Two simple projects I'm needing: - A Tumblr like app where I can post / tag / search the link s I stumbled upon in my daily browsing (with screenshots?). - A secure but simple commenting engine that I can attach to any of my pages (spam / attacks detection; confirm / delete from links in mails). Of course I need them as free software. And I'm probably going to work on them soon.
- nathancahill 13y ago
  1. Check out clippy.in (http://clippy.in/ http://clippy.in/) 2. Why not Disqus?
  - aoloe 13y ago
    As said above, PHP is good when you want something on your own webserver and you don't want your system administrator skills to be challenged. In both cases, I want the software to run on my own server.

dutchbrit 13y ago

What are your hobbies/ambitions?

krapp 13y ago

PHP forum scripts are mostly horrible, out of date and bug-ridden messes. Make something simpler and better that's not a service.

mcintyre1994 13y ago
If this is actually a problem you currently have, I've heard great things about FluxBB[0], it's built on Laravel and also powers the Laravel forums. [0] http://fluxbb.org/ http://fluxbb.org/ EDIT: Its alpha 2.0 is built on Laravel and is a complete rebuild.
- krapp 13y ago
  To be perfectly honest, I think it's a problem for the PHP forum space in general but it's one I don't have time to try solving on my own (not admitting i'd succeed.) Fluxbb looks pretty nice though.
- dylz 13y ago
  I don't see a single hint to laravel in the download[0]? [0] http://fluxbb.org/download/releases/1.5.5/fluxbb-1.5.5.zip http://fluxbb.org/download/releases/1.5.5/fluxbb-1.5.5.zip
  - mcintyre1994 13y ago
    http://fluxbb.org/about/future.html http://fluxbb.org/about/future.html Sorry, I guess I was mistaken - the currently alpha FluxBB 2.0 is Laravel, the current one (1.55) is a fork of something else.
- Keyframe 13y ago
  It's still an old forum-like idea. I built an almost feature complete reddit clone (with some HN ideas along the way) in Laravel over the last month or so. I did it so that I can extend it into direction I need it down the road. We're launching in a week or so and my hope is that we will open source it for others to use as well.

gembird 13y ago

thinking about some AI technologies like Natural Language interfaces, intelligent OCR scanners, video crawler with using machine vision .... etc

ohashi 13y ago
Well if you like working with natural language. As far as I know, nobody has ported Natural Language Tool Kit (NLTK) from Python into PHP. I've ported small parts to suit my needs, but I am sure a lot of PHP developers would love having access to the whole thing directly.
- Implicated 13y ago
  Oh the spam that will ensue if/when this happens.
vikp 13y ago
I've been bouncing the idea around in my head for a while to predict the weather in an area from a photostream (ie flickr, twitter, etc). More brightness -> hotter is a simple correlation, but you could extract a lot of interesting image and meta features, I am sure (for instance, maybe people take less indoor photos in the summer). This is more of a "fun" project in realtime, but historical weather data is actually very valuable for things like energy price prediction, and is pretty hard to get. I don't know what the market is like, but there is almost definitely one (I would be a customer if the data is accurate).

wickedOne 13y ago

though i agree with the comments that there's not really an idea restricted to php (jtheory) and your interests would be good to know (jtheory, dutchbrit), i throw in a wild idea as you didn't provide those… an application in which you keep track of your fridge's content (throw a cam driven barcode scanner in there) and suggests meals to cook based on the lowest investment (stuff not in your fridge) taking into account the store closest to you (can throw a little location based feature) your favourite meals sorted desc based on a custom rating (client specific rating db?)… should keep you busy for a while? B-)

actionscripted 13y ago

Find some WordPress bugs/issues/features and start hacking away [1] or find another open-source project to contribute some PHP work to. [1] http://codex.wordpress.org/Developer_Documentation#Contributing_to_WordPress http://codex.wordpress.org/Developer_Documentation#Contribut...

nate 13y ago

My favorite method for generating ideas is this: 1) Find a task I have. If I want to make money later from this idea, this task should probably be something I already pay money for, but if I just want to make my life easier, than forget the money part. My credit card statement is a great place to look for the money making ones. Once I have the task... 2) List out all the steps this task has. Be as detailed as you can. 3) Figure out how to remove as many steps as possible. Seems simple, but I don't see people doing this very much. Instead they focus on making something because it sounds cool or is going to be the next Facebook for people who use Groupon. OXO is one of my favorite examples of doing this. They make household goods. 1) Task: they studied the tasks people have in the kitchen. They watched how people cooked and baked using measuring cups. 2) Steps: one of the weird steps people have in cooking with measuring cups is when they lift the cup to see the water level against the cups ruler. They would do this 4 or 5 times trying to get an accurate amount of water in their cup. 3) Remove: they figured out they could add the measuring cups ruler to the top of the measuring cup so that people could see the measurement while they used the kitchen faucet to add water. They no longer needed to lift the cup up to read the level. So simple, but they shaved off those 4-5 extra steps, and they sold millions of their new measuring cups in 18 months. They innovated on a measuring cup. Pretty inspiring when you think of how long measuring cups have been around and how simple they are. There are so many newer more complicated things around us today that could use the simplification above.

byoung2 13y ago
I saw a good example of this at the LA Car Show yesterday. The new Honda Odyssey minivan has a vacuum cleaner built in to the cargo area, with an extendable hose that can reach all the way to the driver seat. Such a simple idea, I can't imagine how no other manufacturer ever thought of it before.
- jliptzin 13y ago
  What about that great feature where accidentally leaving a cabin light on completely drains the battery so that you can't start the car? Why do so many cars still allow this to happen? I'm no electrical engineer, but it can't be so hard to measure battery life and automatically cut power to the cabin when it gets below a certain threshold.

dysoco 13y ago

You can probably do a simple Twitter-like application, it's simple CRUD and shouldn't be difficult (It's used both in Rails for Zombies and the Rails Book as example iirc) A simple blog engine isn't complicated either.

yareally 13y ago
Redis has a good basic tutorial up for building a Twitter clone with it and Php. Doesn't get into doing comet or web sockets, but it covers the foundation stuff. http://redis.io/topics/twitter-clone http://redis.io/topics/twitter-clone

BigBalli 13y ago

Try this method (for mobile apps): http://mobileappchat.com/mylyrics-giacomo-balli/ http://mobileappchat.com/mylyrics-giacomo-balli/

drizzzler 13y ago

I've got a near fully built front-end that needs a back-end. The project is in the travel industry. It's a lot simpler than AI, video crawling, etc that you mention, but it's straightforward and ready to make money. Ping me on Twitter if you're interested.

MonkoftheFunk 13y ago

I had a similar post, has some links to app ideas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6067537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6067537

sz0ka 13y ago

Write a service for people who got the same issue like you: A web(app|page), where people can submit their computer problems like "I need an application, that scans my calendar from <insert calendar provider here> and alerts me in my browser ten minutes before the event comes up". Programmers than could just pick a task from it and post the solution. The whole thing can be expanded to the maximum like payed work, featured idea's, collaboration / team finding based on activity stats .. you name it :) I hope this helps you a bit.. ./sz0ka

neil_s 13y ago
I wanted to do this, the most similar thing I've found so far is Assembly Made (https://assemblymade.com/ https://assemblymade.com/). It's like Quirky but for software.

X4 13y ago

For MONEY, or NOT? If not, I'd say create a webpage for a charity organization that cares for the environment or children or poor people etc.

jpatapoff 13y ago

I find that it's better to work on a project related to something you're passionate about. Otherwise a couple weeks will go by and you'll have a hard time continuing to work on it. If you want to do something audio related, you can use an API that I built out http://audiour.com/api http://audiour.com/api There are a couple things I want to rework before officially releasing it into the wild, but you can start using it now if you're interested.

puppetmaster3 13y ago

One project would be to learn another programming lang so you know something other that PHP. Same advice I would give to Java or others.

RyanZAG 13y ago
Great. Now he knows two different languages and still has no ideas on what to use them on. Terrible advice. The correct time to learn a new language is when your current one isn't meeting your needs or when you've completed enough projects to have learned as much as possible from your current language and can start bringing in ideas from others. Endlessly learning new languages and never using them is completely backwards.
- scarecrowbob 13y ago
  Just to offer an alternate perspective, I am a developer who spends most of his paid time working on PHP projects, either on a bespoke framework used by a company I work with and a whole lot of WordPress (I'm not a fan, but it is very easy to get well-paid remote work in this system). In the last couple of years, I have learned a number of other languages and frameworks, mostly whatever the "hip" folks are using (Zend, RoR, Django, Ember, Backbone), and of these the only thing that really is useful on a day to day level has been the python scraping framework, Scrapy. Each of these systems has brought me new ways to think about PHP and Javascript code that I never would thought about if I was solely intent on solving the problems I had at hand as best I could in the PHP idioms used by WordPress and this bespoke web framework. For instance, I certainly wouldn't be as comfortable with the map functions if I hadn't done just that little bit of playing Haskell that I did. So in my case, learning other idioms for programming, even those which I don't apply directly, has been tremendously useful in understanding better ways to work with the systems that I have to work with in a day-to-day situation.

adamzerner 13y ago

A web app that plays music (could just be youtube videos), and makes smart ratings and playlists for you based on how long you listen to your songs. The idea is that if you listen to a song for 20 seconds, you don't like it as much as if you listen to it for 2:30. From this data on how much you like songs, you could even get into better predicting of which songs you should try (like Pandora does).

paromi 13y ago
a nice music site, but without the ratings www.groovevibe.com

inafewwords 13y ago

Web app to generate useful ideas for web apps based on user interests

sirsar 13y ago

An RSS reader that flows all the feeds together, but weights them based on frequency. So your once-a-month blog is above your webcomic is above your HN feed.

alb000 13y ago

read the book "The Millionaire Fastlane" by MJ Demarco. after you have read it, your ideas will flow (I think) and you will have a clearer vision on what you really must pursue.