For the main project in my CSE 360 class, we were to build an online Library Management System (LMS) with a database. Previous projects for this class have built up to this by having us search for Open Source Software and think about what the needs and uses of a library system would be.

I did some research and it seemed that PHP and mysql would be a good direction to approach the project from. Of course, I haven’t done much with PHP or mysql outside of some WordPress tweaking so I started Googling frameworks and I came across Yii PHP framework, which is an Open Source framework that supports user logins and mysql out of the box. I set it up on my server to experiment and felt it was a good fit. I had to learn about and get XAMPP going to really get into this as well.

So, in addition to setting up a mysql database, we added Yii User and Rights extensions, Viewer.js, and an additional search extension, esearch.