http://popreviews.ning.com/

A soda pop review site. So far I haven’t done much in the way of real programming (I spent a fair amount of time making the logo, due to my lack of experience with image editors). But I found out a couple of things. Ning is written in PHP (among other things, I’m sure). Ning provides an interface to edit php files, upload, download, etc. But you typically get the original code by cloning an existing site. A few templates are provided. I grabbed a review template. The root directory contains the controllers, such as “index.php” and “addSubject.php”, the actual urls that load up in the web browser. It also contains “config.php”, which serves to allow people to customize a cloned app. There is a template directory called “html”. I edited config.php, a couple of templates, one of the “views”, and uploaded an image. I haven’t investigated the models yet, but I probably will need to when I further customize the site. Or maybe not for this particular one, but a future one. There is a maximum of 10 apps per user.

I am quite impressed with Ning so far. The templates are very well written, and customizing them is an absolutely fantastic way to learn php. AFAIK the user-modifiable application code is in the public domain, too (the code that manages the sites is not).

If any readers have tried Mountain Dew Pitch Black II (sour grape), I’d be interested to read a review.