cybton.com
All projects
Period:
02/2007 - today
Visit project website
Information on the project
cybton.com once used to be a very famous and popular free web hosting service in Austria and other German-speaking areas (Germany and Switzerland) offering 100MB of web space for free without setting any limits to file size as most other free web hosting services do. It was also one of very few providers that let the user switch from PHP4 to PHP5 and back in real-time.
Due to a conflict with its date centre, cybton.com lost access to its servers in the first term of 2006 and was not able to get the servers back. Therefore, the web hosting service had to be stopped and the community was strengthened by implementing new services like community written e-books and new features like a live-preview for the forum.
Nowadays, cybton.com is a community for webmasters and also offers e-books on different topics (e.g. XHTML or PHP) and other community features like the usage of tags to find similar users and topics in forum.
Tasks
I work for cybton.com as a PHP-developer programming different features that shall be implemented. Together with a few other developers I work on all the backend which is not seen by visitors, but leads to flexibility and the possibility for each user to participate.
The e-book system is one of the most important tasks I have done for version 3.5 of cybton.com. Everybody can edit entries and add his own knowledge. Therefore, a function to reverse wrong changes had to be implemented. We also had to make sure that while somebody edits a section, nobody else will overwrite his changes. At the same time we had also to stop people from setting the lock to really long periods. Therefore, the lock is refreshed every 5 minutes using AJAX and might be increased manually to a maximum of 30 minutes.
Moreover, I did most of the development of the tagging functions now being widely used within the community. The tagging system was programmed using object oriented programming and therefore is adaptable to each part of the community. At first it was only used for the bulletin board and e-books, later it was also used for the user pages.