---
title: "Listify: Business Discovery & Ratings Platform"
description: "A server-rendered business directory and rating platform built in core PHP and Bootstrap with Argon2id authentication, MySQL relational schema, and Playwright test coverage."
year: 2023
role: "Lead Developer (B.Tech Capstone Project)"
category: "web-app"
tags: ["php", "mysql", "bootstrap", "javascript", "playwright", "ssr"]
canonicalUrl: "https://sahillangoo.in/projects/listify/"
---

# Listify: Business Discovery & Ratings Platform

> A server-rendered business directory and rating platform built in core PHP and Bootstrap with Argon2id authentication, MySQL relational schema, and Playwright test coverage.

- **Role**: Lead Developer (B.Tech Capstone Project)
- **Year**: 2023
- **Category**: web-app
- **Tech Stack**: php, mysql, bootstrap, javascript, playwright, ssr
- **Live Platform**: https://github.com/sahillangoo/listify-php
- **Source Code**: https://github.com/sahillangoo/listify-php

## The Challenge

During undergraduate engineering studies, local commercial establishments, healthcare clinics, and educational institutions in Kashmir lacked a unified, searchable web directory. Small businesses relied primarily on informal social messaging groups without persistent physical addresses, verified contact information, operating categories, or structured customer feedback mechanisms.

---

## Architectural Solutions & Server-Side Rendering

```
[Browser Client]
       │
       ▼
 [Apache / Nginx] ──(FastCGI)──> [Core PHP 8.2 Runtime]
                                         │
                   ┌─────────────────────┴─────────────────────┐
                   ▼                                           ▼
       [Session & Auth Engine]                      [MySQL / MariaDB]
      (Argon2id Hash / Cookies)                 (Indexed Catalog Schema)
                   │                                           │
                   └─────────────────────┬─────────────────────┘
                                         ▼
                             [Bootstrap 5 SSR HTML]
```

### 1. Relational Database Modeling & Cascade Integrity

Designed a normalized relational schema in MySQL/MariaDB consisting of structured entities for users, business listings, customer reviews, and persistent authentication sessions:

- **Cascade Referential Integrity**: Implemented foreign key constraints with `ON DELETE CASCADE` across sessions and listings, ensuring orphaned records are purged automatically upon user deletion.
- **Spatial Coordinates**: Preserved double-precision `latitude` and `longitude` fields per listing to support geographic mapping, radius filtering, and navigation.
- **Database Indexing**: Positioned index keys across `user_id`, active status flags, and listing categories to maintain fast lookup times as record counts scale.

### 2. Authentication & Session Security

Rather than relying on vulnerable legacy hashing functions, the authentication module was built around modern cryptographic standards:

- **Argon2id Password Hashing**: Utilized PHP's native `password_hash()` implementing the memory-hard `PASSWORD_ARGON2ID` algorithm to defend against GPU-accelerated brute-force attacks.
- **Session Tokens**: Built a dedicated database-backed `sessions` table tracking cryptographically random hex tokens, user associations, and explicit datetime expirations.
- **Role-Based Access Control**: Structured two distinct permission tiers (`user` vs `admin`) governing listing approvals, review moderation, and catalog edits.

### 3. Business Discovery, Categorization & Ratings

Engineered dynamic server-side rendering routes displaying curated category channels:

- **Categorized Catalogs**: Built targeted views for restaurants, banks, educational institutions, hospitals, pharmacies, and ATMs.
- **Aggregated Ratings Engine**: Linked authenticated user reviews to specific business listing identifiers, calculating average rating scores dynamically during server-side template assembly.

### 4. End-to-End Test Automation with Playwright

To verify form submission validation, session state persistence, and cross-browser rendering reliability, an end-to-end test suite was built using **Playwright**:

- Automated browser test suites covering Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit rendering engines.
- Test workflows validating user registration, session authentication, listing creation, and review dispatch.