AstonCV: CV Tracker

A PHP and MySQL web app where programmers create an account, publish a short CV, and search a shared directory of CVs by name or main programming language. I built it during Year 1 of my BSc Computer Science at Aston University to practise server-side web development with a relational database.

Features

• Registration with email validation, a duplicate-account check and passwords hashed with password_hash() (bcrypt).
• Log in and log out with password_verify() and PHP sessions. The edit page redirects to log in if there's no session.
• CV directory listing every CV with name, email and key language.
• Search by name or programming language (SQL LIKE matching).
• CV details page for each person: education, profile and links.
• Edit your own CV: key language (Java, Python, PHP, C++ or JavaScript), education, profile and links. The form is pre-filled with what's saved.

Tech stack

PHP (PDO) · MySQL / MariaDB · HTML · CSS · XAMPP for local development

Security notes

• Every query uses PDO prepared statements with bound parameters, so user input is never pasted into SQL.
• Passwords are stored only as bcrypt hashes.
• Data shown on the page is escaped with htmlspecialchars() to stop stored cross-site scripting (XSS).
• Database credentials sit in config.php, which is git-ignored. Only the template config.example.php is committed.

Project structure

index.php         CV directory and search
register.php      sign-up form and account creation
login.php         log in, starts the session
logout.php        ends the session
cvupdate.php      edit your own CV (logged-in users only)
cvdetails.php     one person's full CV
nav.php           navigation bar (changes when you're logged in)
connectdb.php     opens the PDO connection using config.php
config.example.php  template for your database details
schema.sql        creates the cvs table
css/style.css     styling

Run it locally (XAMPP)

1. Install XAMPP and start Apache and MySQL.
2. Clone this repo into C:\xampp\htdocs\astoncv.
3. In phpMyAdmin (http://localhost/phpmyadmin), create a database called astoncv and run schema.sql in it.
4. Copy config.example.php to config.php and enter your database details (XAMPP's default user is root with no password).
5. Open http://localhost/astoncv/, register an account, log in and fill in your CV.

Possible next steps

• CSRF tokens on the forms, and session ID regeneration after login
• Server-side validation of the links field and length limits on the text fields

Use of AI

The application itself (registration, login, search, the CV pages and the styling) is my own work. Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant) wrote this README and helped prepare the repository for publishing. It moved the database credentials into a git-ignored config.php (adding config.example.php), added schema.sql, and made two small fixes: the stylesheet path, and escaping user data before it is shown on the page. Those changes are in their own commits in the history.