Rantous

Rantous is a social networking and community site for users to rant and rave about anything and everything. The site is powered by PHP and backed by a MySQL database. I started Rantous in June 2007 and built the site from scratch. Rantous was a massive project on both the front end and back end administration panel. I will attempt to describe the many features I spent over a hundred hours programming. In addition to reading about the project, you can also view screen shots of the custom administration panel below.

Registered users can post rants along with a title and description in the category of their choosing. Users can comment rants as well as rate them. Rants can be sorted by category, rating, date, popularity, and more; there was also a rant search engine that examined rants, rant titles, and rant descriptions for specific keywords.

Besides the ability to submit rants, user registration has many benefits similar to social networking sites like Facebook. Users are allowed to maintain a profile showing their interests, schools, favorite quotes/movies/musicians, and much more. Users can post on each others profiles much like Facebook walls. Users can maintain a buddy list and “friend” each other. Users can private message one another. Users can even save and favorite rants of their choosing. Rant popularity takes in to account rant ratings as well as number of times favorited.

With this project I spent the majority of my time creating a customized backend powered by PHP and MySQL. Administrators can manage, edit, and delete users; they can also edit their profiles and preferences. The back end also includes a rant manager for administrators to view, edit, and delete rants. The rant manager also contains a list of reported rants that users have flagged as spam or inappropriate. The comment manager allows users to view, edit, and delete user posted comments as well as look up comments that users have flagged as spam similiar to the reported rants. The general site settings page allows administrators to change site preferences such as MySQL and template settings. The category manager allows administrators to edit, add, and delete categories to which users can submit rants.

Custom Content Management System Screenshots

The Rantous home page displays the latest rants that have been submitted by registered site users. Rants are stored and pulled dynamically from the MySQL database with PHP.

Site users submit rants in to categories predefinied in the administration panel. This page allows for categories to be added, edited, and deleted.

User profiles and rants can be commented on. Comments are stored in the MySQL database and can managed by administrators from this page

The rant editor lets administrators edit rant titles and descriptions as well as change the category and rant body.

The rant manager displays all rants currently stored in the MySQL database. Administrators can view, edit, and delete any rant of their choosing.

Site visitors can report rants that they believe are inappropriate or spam. Administrators can view, edit, monitor reported rants from this page.

Users can also report flag comments as spam or inappropriate. In the comment manager administrators can view, edit, and remove reported comments.

The user manager gives administrators the ability to manage user profiles, modify user groups, change user preferences, and much more. The user manager is powered by PHP and backed by the MySQL database.