Hello NLander will anybody share his/her most challenging project so far,
My most challenging project so far was this WordPress plugin that drives me nut, the $wpdb refuse to work for seven days I was on this object, only to discover that my query is the cause of the problem.
Nland Programmer what is your challenging project so far (please share just curious ).

My most challenging project so far is www.voguepay.com .
Having gathered knowledge from so many projects i had developed including Government databases, successful commercial applications and ERPs for private businesses, I thought I would find it easy building a payment gateway from ground up with strong security in mind.
It is the most challenging project i have ever worked on. I had to study so many popular frameworks to understand where the security strengths and weaknesses lie.

The first challenge was selecting a team. I had to develop a framework from scratch and Nigerian programmers that i interviewed had not even heard of yii framework talk-less of codeigniter, cakephp or Zend.

Overall, it took over a year to launch (It will never be finished) and its really paying off. The acceptance has been overwhelming the Alexa rating has gone from 1.8Million+ to 100k+ in less than a month.

Thanks Lojik for sharing your experience, I thought no one will ever reply to my post, as if nobody has ever faced any challenge developing application.

mehn we all do, the most challenging project that am currently working on is a Project that involves building a back-end for a micro-site that manages data for the the frontend client(mostly mobile), supposed to be a Mobile Application deploy-able on phone, but the issue is the sheer amount of workload,and other Projects, its built in Yii and 90% Dojo toolkit and jQuery.

@lojik the reason is some developers are too comfortable to upgrade their skill-sets, it took me a year before i could jump to OOP, and also some months before i could learn Yii after Zend Framework was a bit too tasking to manage, though there are good devs out there,but the problem is they rather do freelance than work fulltime.

Well at this point in my career I would say my most challenging project is www.smsgator.com. I wanted to give ASP.NET MVC a try and thought building a bulksms website from scratch using it would be an easy task but received the shocker of my life. I was used to the ASP.NET Webforms model, I didn't have the high level abstraction of the web provided by webforms to work with. I forced myself to try out new stuffs/models like TDD, The Repository pattern, IOC/Dependency Injection using StructureMap etc. Though it took longer that expected to get it up, the choice was worth it.

^ trust me its worth it its something i hope to jump into later

hmmmmm creating a framework was my most difficult project i ever encountered.

Very nice projects @lojik & @KoolPitt.

My challenging project (ongoing) is making Classic ASP speak modern web dev, not by choice, just a bind I find myself in with the start-up / mid company I'm engaged with; they have all its "things" written years back, now the company can't scale upwards.

So trying to manage poorly written legacy code, a running business and porting things over --- and for those who are in the same bind, I'm reviving this: http://www.ajaxed.org/ (hopefully I have time to push to the final port to GitHub)

@lojik: you should consider having a designer touch up the site --

@pc_guru: check out Laravel framework for some of those goodness @KoolPitt mentioned, that is if you're wanting to explore it the PHP way.

I've seen it before, the Laravel Framework something about it screams JavaScript, it has this JS/Node feel to it, but I'll look at it again,Yii just makes my life so easy.

@lojik: you should consider having a designer touch up the site --

Thanks. That's been noted.

pc guru: I've seen it before, the Laravel Framework something about it screams JavaScript, it has this JS/Node feel to it, but I'll look at it again,Yii just makes my life so easy.

If you're referring to it's heavy use of callbacks/closure (as is heavy w/ JS things), perhaps -- and that's actually a new feature to PHP, (PHP 5.3+), and it's actually very, very sweet. While Yii is sweet in many respect, it forces its way on you, heavily. Yii, is very heavy handed.That said, if you don't have PHP 5.3+ it can't run

Few things about Laravel that might make it worth trying: A stronger [flexible] ORM/ActiveRecord, flexible (very), written on 5.3 (btw, Yii 2.0 will be too and they'll def be introducing closures, and it'll be JS-like too, I read the map that Yii 2.0 will NOT be backward compatible, so if you're having new dev work with 1.1.x that might be worthy of consideration), very, very, very friendly community.

Yii's Giis and Ziis and quite sweet, but having to fall into a specific paradigm, ummmm....