Project URL: https://banalmagazine.gr

Banal Magazine was a project proposed to me and 2 friends by a common friend.

Banal magazine is a Greek only web magazine created by a friend of ours. Our task was to create the full stack application behind it. We used Laravel, PHP and MySQL for the backend. For the frontend we went with the PWA route, using Nodejs, VueJS and NuxtJS for server-side rendering capabilities. Since the content of the site is static, the performance boost from server-side rendering as well as the SEO capabilities were incredibly important to the experience the final site has. The site also has a "hidden" admin panel for content management capabilities. It is available only to selected members of the writers team.

The Creation

As both me and the friends we created the site with, we have good work experience on REST API and Web Application projects. Setting up the server environment is still one of my favorite tasks. Going through operating system settings in the terminal through SSH never seize to amaze me.  The hardest part of the whole setup was the SMTP server configuration, which took a lot of time and hours to debug. But when we got everything from the SMPT server to the SSL certificates auto-renewal ready, the feeling we got was unbelievable.

My Contributions

Although the project had some interesting challenges, I loved solving two of them. One was the PDF availability for animations and downloads. I created a custom algorithm to parse the PDF to images, hence enabling page turning animations in the frontend. We also added custom image processing to optimize and serve them as fast as possible from our server. The other one was storing formatted text to the database and then showing it correctly to the frontend. We had some back and forth, but we managed to get a working text formatter in the admin panel and enable such capabilities, which gave full artistical control to the writer team.