ABECN Capstone.

A real client, not just an assignment.

ABECN was our NAIT capstone project, where our team worked with a real not-for-profit organization to design and develop a website.

There was more to it than writing code. We had to communicate with the client, figure out what the organization needed, put together a prototype, and work through the development as a team.

The website brought together information about the organization, membership, events, committees, directors, resources and sponsors. Some features were already more involved than the websites I had built before, especially the membership signup and payment process.

I was involved from the conversations to the code.

I helped communicate with the client, took part in our sprint process, and contributed to the prototype before moving into development.

My development work included the moving cards on the website and the Stripe membership signup process. I also researched options for adding an events calendar for talks and seminars, although I can’t confidently name the calendar package I was considering.

I had to learn the framework as I went.

We used Laravel to build the application, but I hadn’t worked with the framework before this project. I needed to get comfortable with how it organized routes, controllers, models and Blade templates while still contributing to the team’s work.

That meant a lot of reading documentation, testing ideas and figuring out how the pieces fitted together. It could be overwhelming, but it was also one of the reasons I enjoyed the capstone.

Looking at the source now, you can see the Laravel structure behind the website: Blade templates for the pages, routes for membership and payment actions, models for members and sponsors, and controllers for managing those features.

Getting the moving cards working.

One of the parts I worked on was the interactive cards. It sounds like a small feature, but getting something to move smoothly and behave properly within the page layout meant experimenting and refining the implementation.

I liked that side of development. It gave the website a little more personality, and it was something I could work through visually as I tested changes.

Learning how to connect memberships to Stripe.

The biggest technical learning experience for me was integrating Stripe into the membership signup process.

It wasn’t just a matter of putting a payment form on a page. I had to understand how the application would identify the selected membership, collect payment details and create the subscription.

The project includes a Stripe payment controller that looks up a membership and creates a subscription through Laravel Cashier. There are also billing and profile-related pages in the application.

Working on this gave me experience connecting a Laravel website to a third-party payment service. It also showed me how much more there is to account for when handling memberships rather than a regular contact form.

More than a brochure website.

The completed project files show several features beyond the pages people can see without signing in. These include member authentication and profile editing, membership information, a searchable member directory, sponsor listings, and administrator tools for managing users and sponsors.

Those were team features, and I don’t want to imply I personally built each one. They show the scope of the capstone and how the different parts of the application needed to work together.

The events page existed in the original project, but the calendar was still a placeholder. My calendar work was research rather than a completed calendar integration.

A different kind of development experience.

This project pushed me outside of what I already knew. I learned a new framework, worked with other developers, communicated with a real client, and dealt with an integration that took more figuring out than I expected.

I came away with a much better understanding of how a larger web application is put together. It also made me realize that I enjoyed working with PHP and Laravel more than I expected.

The original capstone is still something I want to keep as part of my portfolio, including the parts that are unfinished. They’re useful reminders of what I learned and what I’d approach differently now.