Plan UK distribute teaching resources to educators around the globe. This project's requirements were to provide a space where all of the resources could be uploaded, tagged and stored for download anywhere in the world.

The material, ranging from audio though video and documents, mainly tackles development issues and as such the website is very friendly to users with a small Internet connection. It is easy to imagine that in most of the Third World users are using dial up modems.

PHP Framework

My role was to manage a junior PHP developer while also being responsible for development of just under half of the functionality.

CodeIgniter was chosen for a PHP framework although we used it in a slightly unconventional way that allows users to bookmark specific searches.

Easy to use Administration Interface

One of the main challenges on this project was to provide the employees, and volunteers, at Plan with an easy to use administration interface that allows many different people to tag large volumes of media at the same time.

We accomplished this using a Java Applet that allows administrators the ability to drag and drop folders off their desktop into the interface. The applet goes through folder and finds images, even if they are inside further folders themselves, and uploads them one at a time. This greatly eases the burden of not only processing the images but also training administrators on how to use the system.