PVLive is the flagship web application for the Ponyville Live! network, maintained by Bravely Blue Media, LLC.

The PVLive application is built on several powerful technologies:

• Twitter Bootstrap 2 (Frontend UI)
• Phalcon (PHP MVC Framework)
• Doctrine 2 (PHP Database Layer)
• Composer (Dependency Management)
• Vagrant (Local Development)
• Sass (Stylesheets)

Behind the scenes, the system is powered by a LEMP (Linux, nginx, MySQL and PHP) stack.

Contribute!

The PVLive codebase has now been made public, both to help our team maintain transparency and to encourage contributions from the developer community. If you see a bug or other issue with the codebase, please report an issue or submit a pull request!

Developing Locally

Want to help improve the PVL application codebase? Now you can run your own local virtual machine for development! Follow these steps to get started:

• Clone this repository to your hard drive.
• Install Vagrant for your OS.
• Install the Vagrant hostsupdater plugin via Vagrant.
• Install VirtualBox for your OS.
• Open a command line prompt at the root of this repo.
• Type vagrant up in the command line.

If you don't already have the Vagrant box downloaded, this process may take several minutes (or even hours, depending on your bandwidth). The box image is cached locally, though, making future vagrant runs easy.

Note: You will only see live production-grade data from the main PVL server if you have the proper API key set in app/config/apis.conf.php. This API key is private, and available upon request from pr@ponyvillelive.com.

Local Administrator

By default, a super-administrator account will be created that will allow you to log in locally and access all administrative commands.

• Username: admin@ponyvillelive.com
• Password: password

Any account in the PVL database with access to the administer all action will be granted super-administrator rights, so this can be restored via the database if lost for any reason.

SSH

You can connect to the Vagrant VM by typing vagrant ssh into the command line of the host computer.

Web Server

The web server is configured by default to respond to http://dev.pvlive.me. The URL should automatically be added to your hosts file by the Vagrant hostsupdater plugin.

The web application resides by default in the /var/www/vagrant/ directory inside the Vagrant virtual machine.

Database

MySQL can be accessed directly by connecting to the VirtualBox instance via SSH tunnel, using the SSH username vagrant and password vagrant.

The default MySQL root password is password.

Common Tasks

The Vagrant virtual machine is automatically configured with Composer, Node.js and other important tools pre-installed.

Because stylesheets are written in SCSS, they must first be compiled into CSS before changes will be visible in the browser. To do this:

• Connect to the VM using vagrant ssh.
• Type cd /var/www/vagrant.
• Type gulp build.

Alternately, you can use the gulp watch command to constantly monitor the SCSS files for changes and rebuild them on the fly, but this may not work well with some editors that automatically save frequently.

Questions? Comments? Feedback?

Ponyville Live! is a volunteer project, and we depend on your support and feedback to keep growing.

Issues for the PVLive codebase are tracked in this repository's Issues section on Github. Anyone can create a new issue for the project, and you are encouraged to do so.

If you have any further questions, comments or suggestions, just visit the Contact Us page for more information on how to reach our team.