Tools that were used

The 4Real team has used quite a number of software packages and some open source programming languages to create the 4Real portal.
Below we will explain the main tools and how they were benificial to the team.

WordPress

wordpressWordPress is the base of our portal solution. Wordpress is an open source content management system that run on a webserver with PHP and MySQL installed.
We utilised wordpress as the main system for which we developed a survey plugin that allows use to provide a survey system, a website and a forum to the client as one integrated solution.

MySQL

My Structured Query Language or otherwise known as just MySQL is a popular program to manage databases. It is a Relational Database Management System (RDMS) that works directly with WordPress to enable multi users to access the database at once. This RDMS is highly reliable while giving speed for users to access the stored information. Famous websites that use this format include; Google, Flickr, Facebook and Wikipedia.

Notepad++ and programmers notepad

Notepad++ and programmers notebook are text-editors that support syntax highlighting as well as a lot of other features. The development team preferred the application because they are easy to use and powerfull. Most of our PHP and MySQL has been written with these application.

Photoshop CS3

Photoshop is a photo and graphics editing/creating tool. Photoshop allowed us to create clean interfaces designed from scratch given the requirements from the client. We have used Photoshop excessively in the design of our interfaces and editing of graphics send by the client. All marketing design has been done in Photoshop as well.

PHP

PHP was the programming language of choise for this project. Wordpress as mentioned before uses PHP and MySQL so it was only a logical choice to use these languages for our code. This way we could easily interact with the database and wordpress.


SVN

Subversion(SVN) is a version control system that allowed the development team to work on the same code simultaniously and organised. SVN uses a server that is the main repository of the code. Whenever you submit something new to the repository a new revision is created. This was you can revert back to a certain revision and keep working on the project as a group. The SVN repository was always the latest working version/backup of the software.