A question from Askville:

I am just looking for ideas for a project in php. I want to learn some more but don’t feel I have any real good ideas at the moment for an online web app/site. So any suggestions would be real cool, I would rather make something semi-useful instead of just a random blog or something.

Here’s what I would write if I had the time:

• A report generator (ideally, AJAX-driven, so reports could be designed in browser). Reports should be rendered as HTML/CSS, but be exportable into Excel/CSV, Word/RTF, and PDF.  Ideally, multiple DB servers should be supported.
• An advanced statistics library: multiple regression (better yet, two: least-squares and least-absolute-deviation) and ARMA/ARIMA are things I would do first, but if you do MDA or cluster analysis, that would be awesome, too.
• An extensible collaboration solution (possibly implemented as a set of custom modules for Joomla! or Drupal).
• A content management system (CMS) designed for simultaneous deployment with a popular forum package (phpBB, punBB, SMF, vBulletin, ???); essentially, it would be a CMS that would expressly rely on the forum package for user authentication and rights management (so you wouldn’t have to write those), while providing facilities for publishing content not restricted to the forum format.