The Coffee Shop
A full-stack coffee shop website featuring a customer-facing frontend and an admin panel, built during my first year of university.
Overview
The Coffee Shop is a full-stack web application I developed during my first year of university. It was designed to serve as a digital storefront for a cafe, complete with a dynamic menu, a blog, and an administrative backend.
Building this project was my introduction to connecting front-end interfaces with back-end databases. It provided me with foundational experience in web development and server-side scripting, paving the way for the more robust architectural patterns I use today.
Tech Stack
| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| Frontend | HTML5, CSS3 |
| Backend | PHP |
| Database | MySQL |
| Deployment | InfinityFree / Kesug |
Features
- Customer Storefront: A responsive public-facing website where users can view the coffee shop's menu, read blog posts, and find contact information.
- Dynamic Content: Menu items and blog posts are fetched dynamically from the MySQL database.
- Content Management System (Admin Panel): A dedicated
/admin.phproute that allows the shop owner to add, edit, or delete menu items and blog publications.
Lessons Learned
Looking back at this first-year project with the experience I have now, I can identify several critical areas for improvement which have significantly shaped my current development practices:
Centralized Database Connections: In this early build, I created a new, separate database connection directly inside every single PHP file that required one. Today, I understand the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle and connection pooling; I would instead use a single db_connect.php file and include it globally to optimize performance and maintainability.
Secure Authentication: The admin panel was built without a robust, secure login system. It exposed the administrative routes without proper session validation or password hashing. This mistake taught me a vital lesson in web security, and implementing secure authentication (using JWTs or secure session cookies) is now my first priority when building administrative features.