Project Overview
Nexus Social is a complete social media platform built from scratch with PHP and MySQL — no framework abstractions. It covers the full product surface: authentication, content creation, community interaction, search, and a dedicated admin CMS for moderation.
Most tutorial-level projects oversimplify these concerns. This platform was built to handle them comprehensively: secure account flows, role-based access control, draft workflows, and full administrative oversight, all on a hand-rolled backend.
The project demonstrates command of web fundamentals — session security, database design, and server-rendered UI — that frameworks usually hide.
Key Features
- Secure authentication — login and registration with bcrypt password hashing
- Password recovery — email-based reset with token validation
- Personalized profiles — custom user profiles with avatar uploads
- Content creation — posts with image uploads and a draft system for saving before publishing
- Community engagement — likes, comments, and real-time search across posts and users
- Category browsing — organized content discovery
- Admin CMS — complete control panel for managing users, posts, comments, and categories
Technical Highlights
- Hand-built authentication stack — bcrypt hashing, token-validated password reset via PHPMailer, and session management
- Role-based access control — admin and user separation, with a fully independent CMS application
- AJAX interactions — jQuery-driven likes, comments, and search without full page reloads
- Compiled styling pipeline — Tailwind CSS with custom configuration, built via npm scripts
- Perceived performance — skeleton loaders, ScrollReveal scroll animations, and SweetAlert2 modals
- Clear code organization — public pages (/dist), backend handlers (/includes), and admin CMS in separated layers
My Contributions
- Designed the MySQL schema and all content, user, and category data models
- Implemented the complete authentication stack, including recovery emails with PHPMailer
- Built every public-facing page and the full admin CMS
- Implemented moderation workflows for comments, users, and categories
- Set up the Tailwind build pipeline and responsive layouts across the platform
Challenges & Solutions
Challenge: Building secure account flows — registration, login, and password recovery — without a framework providing any of the safety rails.
Solution: Bcrypt password hashing, token-validated email reset flows via PHPMailer, and disciplined session management with role checks on every protected handler.
Result: A role-separated platform with complete, secure account recovery — and a working demonstration that the fundamentals hold up without framework abstractions.
Tech Stack
Frontend: HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript (ES6+), jQuery, Tailwind CSS 3.3
Backend: PHP 8.2, PHPMailer
Database: MySQL (MariaDB 10.4)
Infrastructure: Apache (XAMPP/LAMP/WAMP)
Tools: Composer, npm, ScrollReveal.js, SweetAlert2, Font Awesome
