2023: a final-year project
Car Enthusiast Hub began in May 2023 as a final-year project: a forum, news, member profiles and the first screens for selling a car. It was black on white, with square corners and a thick black stripe on the forum cards.
The home page already had a place for upcoming events, but it was filled with placeholder text. Three years later that plan was still worth finishing.
2026: rebuilt, not replaced
The 2026 version was modernized and redesigned on the original character instead of starting again. The black, the white and the square corners stayed. One accent was added: a yellow taken from the stripe on the car in the sign-in photo.
Three rules hold the design together.
Yellow is only ever a fill.
Never the colour of text.Square corners everywhere.
Tags, buttons, fields, pictures and colour swatches.The stripe marks things that open.
It turns yellow under the pointer.
What members can do
Six parts, one account. Each picture is the real page.
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Forum
Threads with tags and comments, searchable by text or by tag.
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News
Articles by the editors, written in a rich-text editor with images.
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Events
Meets, track days, shows, cruises and rallies. Members say they are going, and everyone sees how many are.
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Garage
Members add their cars. Make and model come from the catalogue; gearbox, fuel, drivetrain and body are picked in one click; colours come from a colour picker; up to 10 photos.
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Buy and sell
A car from the garage goes up for sale with a price in its own currency. Buyers filter by make, model, year, price, mileage, fuel, gearbox and body, and the filters stay in the URL, so a search can be shared.
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Control panel
Admins manage the catalogue of makes and models, or import it from Excel. An import shows what it will add and which rows it skips before anything is saved.
Every page is photographed
Automated tests capture every page at desktop and phone widths, signed out and signed in. If a change alters how a page looks, the test fails and shows the difference. The pictures on this page are those reference images.
Behaviour is tested too: the API has its own tests and static analysis, the web app has unit tests, and there is one end-to-end test for each bug found in the 2023 version.
Built with
- Web
- React 19, TypeScript, React Router 8, TanStack Query, Redux Toolkit, CKEditor 5
- API
- Laravel 13, PHP 8.4, Sanctum, MySQL, OpenAPI documentation
- Quality
- Pest, Larastan, Vitest, Playwright, ESLint, Prettier
- Runs on
- Docker Compose: the database, the API and the web app start with one command
Every commit since the first, in May 2023, is kept: 11 from 2023 in black, 25 from 2026 in yellow. The API and the web app were two repositories and now live in one, with both histories.