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Home Forums Other What would it take to build a live bracket that people can vote on week by week?

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  • #196699
    shortcutt
    Participant

    Hi there,

    I’m working for an online publication as a web designer, and they want a live bracket built. I’m fluent in HTML and CSS and light Javascript/Jquery, but I don’t know any back-end languages. Can anyone advise me on how best to build something like this? Which back-end coding language would be best, and how difficult would it be?

    Basically, I’d create a standard 64-candidate bracket that users will be able to vote on section by section throughout the course of several weeks. Basically a bunch of built-in polls for each section. If anyone could offer guidance that would be awesome, I’m willing to build it myself if it’s not too complicated, otherwise I may have to bring in a back-end person to help out.

    Thanks in advance!

    #196703
    shortcutt
    Participant

    Err, two weeks… Yea I’ve started to discern that I would have to figure out how to use PHP and how to set up a database, and that’s huge right there, and on top of that be building the front end of this project. Seems unrealistic to say the least.

    Thanks for showing me Meteor, but yea it looks like even that is a little advanced for me right now. As for back-end stuff on our servers, I couldn’t tell you, I just know we now run on the Drupal platform. Anyway, I appreciate your answer! It looks like we’ll need to bring on a freelancer.

    #196743
    Senff
    Participant

    Oh….with Drupal, that’s an additional level of difficulty. I consider myself very experienced, and I’m very comfortable with things like WordPress. However, last year I had a job that involved working with Drupal a lot, and I just couldn’t get my head wrapped around it. Tried for 6 months. It just didn’t happen. Quit my job.

    Not trying to demotivate you of course. Just saying that working with Drupal is not easy, and to learn to build a widget/bracket/thing like this in the span of just 2 weeks will be an enormous challenge.

    You may be able to deliver, and you’ll learn a lot, but I’m not sure if you’d come up with a good, robust, working solution. Two weeks just isn’t enough.

    You can learn how to drive a car in a day, but all you really learn is how to operate it. To become a good driver, will take months of practice. And it’s a bit of the same here: you may be able to learn how to work with databases and PHP within those two weeks, but to do it properly, will take much longer.

    Another thing to consider is that there already are modules that do what you want, most likely. So instead of reinventing the wheel, maybe it would make sense to look into existing solutions, use that and then maybe tweak those a bit?

    #196767
    shortcutt
    Participant

    Exactly, I came across that tutorial shortly after I posted this but taking this information and evolving it into something that’s much more complex and Drupal-compatible (not to mention sustainable and reusable, which is another goal with this), all while trying to build a really nice front-end with smooth interactivity in the course of 2 weeks is crazy. Not to mention if errors pop up after this goes live, which they inevitably will, I’ll be hard-pressed to find a quick solution with only a cursory knowledge. Part of me really wants to try but I think it will end with me slamming my head into the wall repeatedly.

    And yea, I foresee lots of issues with Drupal compatibility considering everything seems more difficult and less user-friendly than it has to be, and we have a brand-customized version so there seems to be no real straight-forward guide. I haven’t had to work with it too much since I’m using microsites and just uploading straight code files for custom feature treatments.

    All this being said I definitely want to learn this stuff anyway, perhaps not on a deadline, but it would be nice to round out my development knowledge for future reference.

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