This is a sample voting app. It is built using Symfony 2 and Twitter Bootstrap 2.

• PHP >= 5.3 and a web server
• A database server (MySQL is used in the examples of how to set it up)
• Redis server

• Once you have checked out the code, cd into symfony/ and run php bin/vendors install which will install all the dependencies from Git
• Copy symfony/app/config/parameters.ini.dist to symfony/app/config/parameters.ini and tweak as necessary
• Run php app/console doctrine:database:create to create the database, and php app/console doctrine:schema:update --force to create the database schema
• Check that the snc_redis settings in app/config/config.yml are suitable for your environment
• Make sure symfony/app/cache and symfony/app/logs are writable by the webserver (see 'Setting up Permissions' in the Symfony docs)
• Issue the following SQL commands against your database:

LOAD DATA INFILE '/path/to/root/symfony/parties.csv' INTO TABLE parties FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY '"' (name);
LOAD DATA INFILE '/path/to/root/symfony/constituencies.csv' INTO TABLE constituencies FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY '"';

Below is a sample nginx configuration file for the site which uses php-cgi:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name vote.domain.tld;

    root /data/vote.domain.tld;

    access_log /var/log/nginx/vote.domain.tld.access.log;

    keepalive_timeout 5;

    location / {
        index app.php;
        try_files $uri /app.php?$args;
    }

    location ~ ^/(app|app_dev)\.php(/|$) {
        location ~ \..*/.*\.php$ {return 404;}
        fastcgi_pass        127.0.0.1:9000;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME   $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_param HTTPS             off;
    }
}

Improvements that could be made:

• The method of determining who has voted is rudimentary (a combination of IP, user agent and request time, the latter for testing purposes) and should be hashed and set as a cookie
• The user experience isn't brilliant:
  • Need something more on the index page to entice people to vote (probably a pie chart of overall voting trends, explanatory text etc)
  • Selection of constituency on the results page isn't user-friendly - search by map/postcode
  • Same on voting page: should be able to enter a postcode rather than choose the constituency
  • Look and feel should be customised to make it less 'bootstrap-y'
  • Needs more graphics (graphs) to make the information easier to digest
• The code needs commenting and automated tests built for it