Beyond the training and consulting business I am also part-time teacher for the Technology School Electronic Systems - Sofia and I do teach web technologies and WordPress. As the representer of the Web 2.0 world I took part in mentoring 2 teams for their diploma research assignments based on CodeIgniter.

One of the projects was a music web portal for artists, media, albums and more. Encyclopedia format for music addicts that could easily transform in a front-end manner using the same database structure. It was meant to start as a hard rock and metal project and later easily skinned and themed into other music categories as well. I really do hope to see it ready, as I already saw most pages and the database structure which extended the modeling structure that exists by default in CodeIgniter.

The other project is a social network for places. A mix of the foursquare listing of categories and places and the Golden Pages catalogue, but with better interaction for users, taking advantage of the localization browser services and latest HTML 5 fine tunes. It has a pretty neat design and more than 30 DB tables at the moment and is going to be ready soon. Users in the site could interact to each other and follow the new places being added with their comments. The basic idea is filling in a database of places with location (easy to find in a Google Map) with comments, ratings and more that is built on the CodeIgniter framework. This is a great profiler that helps the PR managers of a company or a restaurant to improve the quality and social skills and keeps the good rating online.

I'm glad to see the enthusiasm of the development process and the improving code quality and feature set. Both teams work hard and would probably take part in competitions with their projects.