Live project: created and maintained by Emily Herr as a self-directed community platform, not a commissioned client engagement. Development is ongoing.
The project at a glance
- Project: Septagon, a gaming community and custom forum platform.
- Creator: Emily Herr — self-directed design and full-stack development.
- Stack: Angular front end and Laravel API back end; Cloudflare for front-end and image hosting.
- Status: Live and under active development, rather than a finished, one-off launch.
- Explore: Visit Septagon or view Emily’s original project entry.
The brief: build a place people can return to
Septagon is a community application, not a marketing site with a discussion board attached. Its purpose is to give a gaming community a home for news, ongoing conversations, and member-to-member communication, with an identity of its own.
The scope combines interface design, front-end development, a server-side API, and the ongoing work of running a live application. Rather than stopping at a visual concept, the project connects the screens to the interactions a community uses day to day.
A familiar forum, with its own personality
The interface uses a dark palette, a distinctive Septagon wordmark, and direct navigation to the community’s main spaces: News, The Flood, Gaming, Serious, and Help. A featured-news area gives the homepage an editorial role, while recent posts provide a way back into current activity.
That structure serves two different visits. Someone checking in can start with announcements; someone returning to a discussion can head straight to its forum. The design brings a recognizable forum model into a custom application without making every interaction look like a generic business dashboard.
The work: conversations, not just pages
Threads and replies
Discussion pages bring the topic, author identity, replies, and posting tools together. Public threads show member roles, edited-post states, likes, reply relationships, and pagination. These are the small pieces that make a community platform more involved than a collection of static pages: the interface needs to communicate who said what and how the conversation fits together.
A more useful writing experience
The posting toolbar offers formatting, links, images, uploads, and video controls alongside a Markdown reply field. The public editor update records the rollout of the toolbar and image uploads, followed by support for editing posts and creating threads.
This is a practical example of incremental product development: improve an everyday interaction, extend it across related workflows, and keep the community informed as the implementation changes.
Private conversations
Septagon also includes private messaging, announced in the “PMs are live” update. That adds a separate communication channel alongside public discussion, so not every exchange has to become a forum thread.
Under the hood: Angular meets Laravel
Angular handles the browser-facing application, while a Laravel API provides the back end. Separating those responsibilities allows the community interface and the server-side application to evolve as distinct parts of the same product.
The work also involves operating the application after its initial release. A front-end migration update documents the move to Cloudflare hosting. An image migration update describes moving uploaded media to Cloudflare from an earlier Firebase bucket.
Moving a community’s media involves more than changing the upload destination. Existing files, old links, migration failures, and member support also need attention. Septagon’s public migration notes make those operational concerns visible alongside feature development.
An ongoing product, not a polished finish line
The visible result is a live community platform with public discussions, community news, a posting editor, image uploads, and private messaging. Public updates and member replies show a project being used and refined over time.
The outcome is a working product, not a forecast. The evidence is the visible application and its documented releases, rather than a claimed business uplift. Development continues as the community uses the site and new needs emerge.
The takeaway
A custom application earns its place when its interactions matter as much as its appearance. Septagon brings visual identity, front-end development, API-backed functionality, and ongoing hosting work into one real product.
For Herr Systems, it demonstrates the hands-on development experience behind the service list: building beyond the brochure, making connected features work together, and continuing to maintain the result after people start using it.