Back in 2006, I created an application called Realestate Manager, which is essentially a realestate listings system. I had always talked about doing a similar system for car dealerships, but I never seemed to get around to actually doing it.

Until now.

One of the classes I have to take for my major is called “Systems Development.” Throughout the course of the class you must plan and develop a software project. Automotive Manager would be a perfect project for this class. I already had experience with listings systems from Realestate Manager, so this would be an easy project.

Unlike Realestate Manager, Automotive Manager is being built on the CakePHP framework. I eventually have plans to convert Realestate Manager over to Cake as well. this will allow me to easily share a large portion of the codebase between the two systems. When I make an update to one system, it will be fairly simple to make the same update to the other system.

for those of you questioning if a framework makes things easier, get this… The first line of code for Automotive Manager was written February 3rd. I had a nearly fully functional admin panel in under two weeks of working on it in my spare time. All that’s left on the admin-side is some picture uploading work and a static page editor.

Look for more news on it in the coming weeks. I have to have it fully functional in about 8 weeks, so there will probably be some updates around that time.