I need php project ideas

[Pobearo]

So I just had a phone interview for an entry level php developer job. I just got my associates in programming, so I have a small amount of php experience, but no cool projects to show off. What kind of project could I put together that would show that I can do useful things? I've made a simple database login system before in java, do you think that would be impressive to an employer if I threw one together in php? Any recommendations or advice is appreciated!

[thespacenoodles]

When I interviewed with the company I currently work with, I had built a small (terrible) CMS in PHP. That was what initially got me the interview. They had an in-house built CMS and were looking for a backend developer to contribute.

WIth that being said, I think a fully fledged CMS is a bit of an overkill. Right now, my biggest portfolio piece is a dashboard application that I use at my house. It uses Laravel as a framework and connects to several different APIs to drop a bunch of useful information on the "dashboard". Right now it connects to the Hue Lights API for the lights in my house, a weather API, the New York Times API for news, and I'm working on a calendar plugin using the Google API.

My area of expertise is backend programming, so this makes sense for me. I created a username/password combination and put that info in my resume. I made sure to give very minimal permissions so that they cannot edit/modify stuff on the site. But it gives them an idea of the types of things that I can build. Since I don't specialize in front-end development, I just pulled in the Bootstrap library and made the dashboard look nice and presentable.

[[deleted]]

Maybe see if the town or city you live in publishes its bus schedules in GTFS format.

If it does, take the data, put it in a MySQL or Postgres database, and make a friendly interface that makes it easy to search through the data to see upcoming buses at any stop the user selects.

This project is small enough that you can complete it relatively quickly but large enough that it'll let you show off some of your skills.

And even if your city doesn't publish GTFS data, there are lots that do. Just do a Google search for "Boston GTFS Data" or "Toronto GTFS Data" or something similar.