Red Wire Fire is a fire alarm system drawing & design company. They needed a project management application to keep track of contractor companies, projects and the files that belong to each project.
When I was asked to help with their site, they had a WordPress site that had a janky contact form for the project details. There was not a connection between projects and files for projects or projects and companies.
Since the project files are typically quite large, they were not able to send them over email. This was causing problems for the designers because it was difficult to keep files and projects together. Further, contractors were irritated with the difficult uploading process where drop box was being used for large file transfer.
We determined that a custom application would serve their needs better than the WordPress site, so we chose Laravel to build it. The goal was to build an application focusing on:
- Ease of use for the contractors
- Tight cohesion between contractors, individual projects, and files that belong to each project.
- Notifications of progress from project creation, file uploads, and final design file uploads.
Project Outline
- A registration form where contractors could create an account and enter the details of their business.
- A “plan room” where contractors could log in and create new projects and enter all pertinent details about the project.
- Each plan room needed to have a drag and drop file uploader where contractors could add project files.
- Once these files are added the application needs to notify the designers that they have some work to do.
- Designers receive an email which links directly to the project to where they can download the files.
- When designers are done working on the project they needed to be able to upload the final design to the project.
- Once the final design files are uploaded the application needs to notify the contractor that their design is ready.
- The contractor receives an email with a direct link to the project where they can download the completed design files.
- When a project is complete the designer should be able to mark it as complete to remove it from the list of active projects that require additional work.
- If a project is re-opened for any reason the designers need to have the ability to remove the complete project status.
- An admin section where admin users can log in and see/manage all projects and files.
The technology used in this project:
- PHP/ Laravel 5.6
- Tailwind css
- VueJs
- Webpack
- MySql
- Ubuntu
Final thoughts
- I built this site alone from a fresh Laravel install to deployment in 1.5 weeks, including server setup and automated deployments and site design.
- The design was done very quickly because Red Wire Fire didn’t want to spend too much money on the site design. All of the design work on the site was done in about 3-5 hours using Tailwind css
- It has 100% test coverage
- The customer was paying $120/month for their “custom” WordPress site. Once we finished this application we put them on a $5/m Digital Ocean server saving them $115/month in web application expenses.
- You can view the public pages of the application here: https://redwirefire.com