Catapult Magazine

2005-Present
Technologies: PHP, MySQL, Atom, Perl

Established four years ago as part of the non-profit Culture Is Not Optional organization, Catapult is a popular magazine exploring all manner of cultural themes and trends through their 22 themed issues each year. Early in the summer of 2005 Catapult asked me for support migrating their existing coldfusion based system to a PHP codebase that they could then do further work on.

I took their database structure and reworked the code from the ground-up, using perl to make some quick transformations to the database, PHP to build an object-oriented system to manage both the front and back-end of the magazine, used mod_rewrite to produce new friendlier URLs without breaking old links, and provided atom feeds for all issues of the magazine. I also provided basic training in how the code worked and how changes could be made, and assisted with the conversion of the HTML to clean, semantic markup and the layout to CSS.

We are presently discussing ways to better integrate other sites from the same organization.

Visit the site at: http://www.catapultmagazine.com.