Ask HN: Give me some PHP project or web app ideas - gembird
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nate
My favorite method for generating ideas is this:

1) Find a task I have. If I want to make money later from this idea, this task
should probably be something I already pay money for, but if I just want to
make my life easier, than forget the money part. My credit card statement is a
great place to look for the money making ones. Once I have the task...

2) List out all the steps this task has. Be as detailed as you can.

3) Figure out how to remove as many steps as possible.

Seems simple, but I don't see people doing this very much. Instead they focus
on making something because it sounds cool or is going to be the next Facebook
for people who use Groupon.

OXO is one of my favorite examples of doing this. They make household goods.

1) Task: they studied the tasks people have in the kitchen. They watched how
people cooked and baked using measuring cups.

2) Steps: one of the weird steps people have in cooking with measuring cups is
when they lift the cup to see the water level against the cups ruler. They
would do this 4 or 5 times trying to get an accurate amount of water in their
cup.

3) Remove: they figured out they could add the measuring cups ruler to the top
of the measuring cup so that people could see the measurement while they used
the kitchen faucet to add water. They no longer needed to lift the cup up to
read the level.

So simple, but they shaved off those 4-5 extra steps, and they sold millions
of their new measuring cups in 18 months.

They innovated on a measuring cup. Pretty inspiring when you think of how long
measuring cups have been around and how simple they are. There are so many
newer more complicated things around us today that could use the
simplification above.

~~~
byoung2
I saw a good example of this at the LA Car Show yesterday. The new Honda
Odyssey minivan has a vacuum cleaner built in to the cargo area, with an
extendable hose that can reach all the way to the driver seat. Such a simple
idea, I can't imagine how no other manufacturer ever thought of it before.

~~~
jliptzin
What about that great feature where accidentally leaving a cabin light on
completely drains the battery so that you can't start the car? Why do so many
cars still allow this to happen? I'm no electrical engineer, but it can't be
so hard to measure battery life and automatically cut power to the cabin when
it gets below a certain threshold.

~~~
andycav
My BMW did just that: if the battery voltage decreasde under a specific
threshold (when the engine was off), any light was switched off. A good idea,
anyway.

AC

~~~
jliptzin
Glad to see some manufacturers finally using common sense.

~~~
bp999
My Subaru has it to, I'm so surprised it hasn't caught on for how useful it
is.

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actionscripted
Find some WordPress bugs/issues/features and start hacking away [1] or find
another open-source project to contribute some PHP work to.

[1]
[http://codex.wordpress.org/Developer_Documentation#Contribut...](http://codex.wordpress.org/Developer_Documentation#Contributing_to_WordPress)

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jtheory
What makes a project/webapp idea well-suited to PHP? It might be better to ask
about your interests, your experience, etc.. Presumably you've branched off
from coding basic CRUD apps into something more specialized; do you have
expertise (and contacts, domain knowledge, etc.) you might want to leverage in
a new project? Or do you want to start a side project to build more expertise
in X?

What do you want out of this?

Suggestions for finding (and validating) ideas for new webapps/projects are
all over; you might check into those.

~~~
aoloe
PHP is wells suited for software that you want the users to install on "their"
server without requiring any server configuration skills.

Two simple projects I'm needing:

\- A Tumblr like app where I can post / tag / search the link s I stumbled
upon in my daily browsing (with screenshots?). \- A secure but simple
commenting engine that I can attach to any of my pages (spam / attacks
detection; confirm / delete from links in mails).

Of course I need them as free software. And I'm probably going to work on them
soon.

~~~
nathancahill
1\. Check out clippy.in ([http://clippy.in/](http://clippy.in/))

2\. Why not Disqus?

~~~
aoloe
As said above, PHP is good when you want something on your own webserver and
you don't want your system administrator skills to be challenged.

In both cases, I want the software to run on my own server.

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comicjk
My way of learning a programming language is always to write a chess program
in it (this is probably why I haven't learned any languages which don't
encourage state). A multiplayer chess site would be a fun and challenging
project.

~~~
cgag
I think you should check some of those languages out. Chess is used as an
example in the Joy of Clojure, and I've seen it used to teach Haskell as well:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScS8Q32lMxA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScS8Q32lMxA)
(note, you can't really see anything here unless yout put it in HD and view in
full screen).

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wickedOne
though i agree with the comments that there's not really an idea restricted to
php (jtheory) and your interests would be good to know (jtheory, dutchbrit), i
throw in a wild idea as you didn't provide those…

an application in which you keep track of your fridge's content (throw a cam
driven barcode scanner in there) and suggests meals to cook based on the
lowest investment (stuff not in your fridge) taking into account the store
closest to you (can throw a little location based feature) your favourite
meals sorted desc based on a custom rating (client specific rating db?)…

should keep you busy for a while? B-)

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sz0ka
Write a service for people who got the same issue like you: A web(app|page),
where people can submit their computer problems like "I need an application,
that scans my calendar from <insert calendar provider here> and alerts me in
my browser ten minutes before the event comes up". Programmers than could just
pick a task from it and post the solution. The whole thing can be expanded to
the maximum like payed work, featured idea's, collaboration / team finding
based on activity stats .. you name it :) I hope this helps you a bit..
./sz0ka

~~~
neil_s
I wanted to do this, the most similar thing I've found so far is Assembly Made
([https://assemblymade.com/](https://assemblymade.com/)). It's like Quirky but
for software.

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jpatapoff
I find that it's better to work on a project related to something you're
passionate about. Otherwise a couple weeks will go by and you'll have a hard
time continuing to work on it.

If you want to do something audio related, you can use an API that I built out
[http://audiour.com/api](http://audiour.com/api) There are a couple things I
want to rework before officially releasing it into the wild, but you can start
using it now if you're interested.

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adamzerner
A web app that plays music (could just be youtube videos), and makes smart
ratings and playlists for you based on how long you listen to your songs. The
idea is that if you listen to a song for 20 seconds, you don't like it as much
as if you listen to it for 2:30. From this data on how much you like songs,
you could even get into better predicting of which songs you should try (like
Pandora does).

~~~
paromi
a nice music site, but without the ratings www.groovevibe.com

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krapp
PHP forum scripts are mostly horrible, out of date and bug-ridden messes. Make
something simpler and better that's not a service.

~~~
mcintyre1994
If this is actually a problem you currently have, I've heard great things
about FluxBB[0], it's built on Laravel and also powers the Laravel forums.

[0] [http://fluxbb.org/](http://fluxbb.org/)

EDIT: Its alpha 2.0 is built on Laravel and is a complete rebuild.

~~~
Keyframe
It's still an old forum-like idea. I built an almost feature complete reddit
clone (with some HN ideas along the way) in Laravel over the last month or so.
I did it so that I can extend it into direction I need it down the road. We're
launching in a week or so and my hope is that we will open source it for
others to use as well.

~~~
krapp
>I built an almost feature complete reddit clone (with some HN ideas along the
way) in Laravel over the last month or so.

I've had one running on Pagodabox for a while now that's still only mostly
done. I look forward to seeing yours.

------
X4
For MONEY, or NOT?

If not, I'd say create a webpage for a charity organization that cares for the
environment or children or poor people etc.

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drizzzler
I've got a near fully built front-end that needs a back-end. The project is in
the travel industry. It's a lot simpler than AI, video crawling, etc that you
mention, but it's straightforward and ready to make money. Ping me on Twitter
if you're interested.

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dysoco
You can probably do a simple Twitter-like application, it's simple CRUD and
shouldn't be difficult (It's used both in Rails for Zombies and the Rails Book
as example iirc)

A simple blog engine isn't complicated either.

~~~
yareally
Redis has a good basic tutorial up for building a Twitter clone with it and
Php. Doesn't get into doing comet or web sockets, but it covers the foundation
stuff.

[http://redis.io/topics/twitter-clone](http://redis.io/topics/twitter-clone)

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MonkoftheFunk
I had a similar post, has some links to app ideas
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6067537](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6067537)

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BigBalli
Try this method (for mobile apps): [http://mobileappchat.com/mylyrics-giacomo-
balli/](http://mobileappchat.com/mylyrics-giacomo-balli/)

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sirsar
An RSS reader that flows all the feeds together, but weights them based on
frequency. So your once-a-month blog is above your webcomic is above your HN
feed.

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gembird
thinking about some AI technologies like Natural Language interfaces,
intelligent OCR scanners, video crawler with using machine vision .... etc

~~~
ohashi
Well if you like working with natural language. As far as I know, nobody has
ported Natural Language Tool Kit (NLTK) from Python into PHP. I've ported
small parts to suit my needs, but I am sure a lot of PHP developers would love
having access to the whole thing directly.

~~~
Implicated
Oh the spam that will ensue if/when this happens.

------
puppetmaster3
One project would be to learn another programming lang so you know something
other that PHP. Same advice I would give to Java or others.

~~~
RyanZAG
Great. Now he knows two different languages and still has no ideas on what to
use them on.

Terrible advice.

The correct time to learn a new language is when your current one isn't
meeting your needs or when you've completed enough projects to have learned as
much as possible from your current language and can start bringing in ideas
from others. Endlessly learning new languages and never using them is
completely backwards.

~~~
scarecrowbob
Just to offer an alternate perspective, I am a developer who spends most of
his paid time working on PHP projects, either on a bespoke framework used by a
company I work with and a whole lot of WordPress (I'm not a fan, but it is
very easy to get well-paid remote work in this system).

In the last couple of years, I have learned a number of other languages and
frameworks, mostly whatever the "hip" folks are using (Zend, RoR, Django,
Ember, Backbone), and of these the only thing that really is useful on a day
to day level has been the python scraping framework, Scrapy.

Each of these systems has brought me new ways to think about PHP and
Javascript code that I never would thought about if I was solely intent on
solving the problems I had at hand as best I could in the PHP idioms used by
WordPress and this bespoke web framework.

For instance, I certainly wouldn't be as comfortable with the map functions if
I hadn't done just that little bit of playing Haskell that I did.

So in my case, learning other idioms for programming, even those which I don't
apply directly, has been tremendously useful in understanding better ways to
work with the systems that I have to work with in a day-to-day situation.

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vtempest
[http://www.freelancer.com/jobs/php/](http://www.freelancer.com/jobs/php/)

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NicoJuicy
I have like 5 a day... So i don't think it's hard ;)

Also, ideas are very subjective :)

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alb000
read the book "The Millionaire Fastlane" by MJ Demarco. after you have read
it, your ideas will flow (I think) and you will have a clearer vision on what
you really must pursue.

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inafewwords
Web app to generate useful ideas for web apps based on user interests

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dutchbrit
What are your hobbies/ambitions?

