List & Check, an open source Symfony project

I have just released a pet project I have been developing lately. It is called List & check, and it is about making (beautiful) lists easily.

What it is about

I use lists for almost everything: things I want to try, things I want to do this week, books to read, movies to watch, places to visit, steps to do before a deployment… and since I saw the beautiful symfony-check website, I just wanted to be able to create lists with that beautiful look and great user experience.

I think that other list fans may enjoy it.

Things I wanted to try

I wanted to use this pet project as playground to try some things:

• I used the Doctrine ORM, because I was using before Propel. I think that the change is worthwile only looking at the amount of documentation available for each ORM. I used the csDoctrineActAsSortablePlugin to make items sortable and it worked smoothly.
• Redmine as a replacement of trac and pivotal tracker. I hate the installation of trac, Redmine gives me just what I wanted with a good user interface. It integrates well with git as well.
• Git for Symfony. I am big fan of git, but I have had problems in the past working with Symfony and the huge amount of svn:externals you have to deal with. I have tried several scripts for doing the job, but none of them worked properly, and I had to tweak them… But, thanks to vjousse, that has placed a Symfony git repository in github, this time was very easy.
• Ajaxized edit view. I wanted to have only a view both for editing the lists and for showing them better than having separate views for these actions. I think that for this project it makes sense to have everything in one place and the user experience is better, as in projects like Pivotal Tracker.
• Focus in user experience. Related to the previous point, it is important that you can create lists, create new items, sorting and deleting them quickly, just writing the title and pressing enter over and over. At the same time, I wanted to make possible to detail the items. It may be stupid for a list of places to visit or a to-do list for this evening, but it makes sense for lists like steps to set up a workstation. This is a feature I miss in Tadalist. So now I can create lists quicky and as detailed as I want, given the markdown editor. I used also jquery-ui that made my life easier.
• Markdown editor. Markdown is just great for creating content, and was very useful as format for the items’ description.
• Selenium. In my roadmap I want to create selenium tests for the whole site. I have not done it yet, because I have been tuning the user interface until the last moment, but looks like the perefect project to test with Selenium.

It is Open source

The full code is hosted at github. The idea is more to give ideas to other people for doing their websites, but if you want you can set up a list&check server. I have learnt a lot from the source code of symfonians and other OS projects, and I wanted to give something back to the community.