Dropping Plantr 2.0

12 January 2021

That's right you heard me!

Plantr 2.0 Released! #

Maybe it's more of a 1.0 and the last one was a 0.0. 🤔 Well anyway, this is my latest and greatest project, Plantr.

I had heaps of fun building Plantr. Here's the stack it's built on:

• Heroku for hosting (the free version at the moment so a slow initial pageload)
• AWS postgres database (configured through Heroku)
• PHP
• Laravel
• Alpine.JS for front-end interactions
• Vanilla CSS for styling and animations
• Inkscape for illustrations
• Blade Icons to integrate the SVGs into Laravel
• SVGO for vector image optimisations
• Squoosh for raster image optimisations and conversions

What I've been learning building Plantr #

I put a whole lot of work into making it an awesome user experience using animations, illustrations and icons. I used Alpine.JS a lot on the front end, because it integrates so easily with laravel.

Here's a link to the source code, and a tweet with a preview.

I was mainly trying to learn about Laravel building this app. I dug into eloquent models, blade templating, form validation and authentication. I actually editted the composer.json to pull in a library which is something I've been too scared to do so far. I also got into illustration. I'm really proud of how the icons I drew on inkscape turned out.

Looking forward #

There always feels like more to do with side projects. Some things on the todo list include getting some more functionality happening with regards to different climates and different tyoes of planting.

Also it would probably be good to add a few more options to the plants. Also I said I would write some tests for this project and I haven't written them . . . yet.

Finally I want to dig more into asset compilation. The CSS and JS in this project isn't even minified. Although I did configure webpack from scratch for a React project I wasn't super sure how to do it in a laravel friendly way. Mixing the Node and PHP environments just seemed a little bit weird to me - even though it's the norm. I enjoy doing things in a simple way so I thought about pulling in grunt or gulp to do some quick CSS minification. But there just aren't enough hours in the day. And always more stuff to learn!

I think I'm going to leave Plantr alone for now and look toward a new project. We'll see what happens