kittee/project-blog

Warm-up application for students to get familiar gathering requirements, planning, and then building a small-size web application using Ruby.

project-blog's Issues

Research

The Omaha Code School blogs:

• Mine (Tumblr): http://caraisakitty.tumblr.com
• Andy's blog (Wordpress): http://andycodes.wordpress.com
• Brandon's blog (Wordpress): http://blnorris.com/blog/
• Johnathon's blog (Wordpress): http://johnathonl.wordpress.com/2014/03/01/preface/
• Kaitlyn's blog (probably Wordpress?): http://kaitlynhova.com/theleftbrain/?page_id=240
• Michael's blog (Tumblr): http://michaelsedits.tumblr.com

Other blogs or blog-like sites I follow:

• The Bloggess (Wordpress): http://thebloggess.com
• The Oatmeal (not a blog, but still a series of posts, articles, and comics that are kinda like a blog): http://theoatmeal.com

Requirements and Plan

Requirements

User info (possibly multiple users, but I’m not sure if this is an individual’s blog site or a blog site for multiple people to sign up), which will have:

• ID
• Username
• Password
• First name
• Last name
• Email address? (for recovering lost passwords maybe; I can’t think of anything else my super basic blog site would want it for)
• Social media links (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

Profile page, displaying the user info and maybe previews of blog posts

Blog posts, which will have:

• ID
• User foreign ID (if there are going to be multiple users)
• Title
• Date posted (user cannot set this)
• Blog content
• Pictures?

Comments, which will have:

• ID
• Post foreign ID
• Commenter name
  • I am not going to force people to sign up to leave a comment, so there will be no need to have any sort of Commenter class keeping track of commenters (at least in the foreseeable future). If a commenter leaves multiple comments, they will not necessarily be related to one another by the commenter. Each Comment is a standalone object.
  • I am doing this mainly because people don't like being forced to sign up for stuff just to leave a comment. I'm sure that for now this will be a small enough thing that making people sign up won't be necessary.
• Comment post date
• Comment content
• Commenter email?
  • Maybe I'd like to contact them directly about something they say, or at least confirm they are a person and not a bot.
  • This will not be visible to the public, just required to leave a comment and then only available to me.

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Plan

Set up folder structure and files.

• Check when done.

Create a database with tables for all that stuff in the requirements.

• Users table (which may only have one row if this is just for one user)
• Posts table
• Comments table

Write tests, I guess. ):

• Test ALL the tests! (And fail, for now.)

Write the back-end Ruby that allows for updating the database.

Needed classes:

• User
• Post
• Comment

Needed methods and their associated classes (will keep adding to this as needed):

• User: Create new user?
  • If there is only one user (myself), it probably won't be necessarily to write a method for this. I would just add myself manually using SQLite in the terminal.
• User: Edit user info
• Post: Create post
• Post: Edit post
• Post: Delete post
• Add a picture (only for posts) No uploading pictures for now ):
• Comment: Create comment
• Comment: Edit comment (only allowed by user)
• Comment: Delete comment (only allowed by user)

Write the front-end views where the blog is displayed, using Sinatra.

• Log in/sign up page
• Main page, where the latest blog posts are displayed
• About (profile page)
• Archive
• Contact
• Make a post
• Edit a post (perhaps similar to the view for making a post)

CSS

• CSS ALL the pages!

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Learn Things!

I think I have an idea, but feel a little sketchy on:

• Having the user sign in and out
• Denying certain permissions to someone who is not the appropriate user
• Delete things out of the database that were just tests. It would be nice when running tests if the test could auto-delete what it inputted after it’s done.

I have no idea how to:

• Store pictures. Can pictures even go in a database? Will they have to be uploaded elsewhere else and we just store the URL? This is very important to my blog in particular since a lot of what makes Cara is a Kitty fun is the doodles. This won't be happening for now.
• Have a post know what the current date and time is. I sort of remember something like this from pre-work.
• Rename columns using SQLite. I don't want to get a lot of comments only to discover I need to edit the table and have to drop the whole table and start over. In the past when I've tried to edit column names, SQLite wouldn't let me.

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Bonus Features

These things may or may not be out of the scope of this project. (They are probably out of the scope, I'm guessing.)

• Multiple users
• Customizable themes, like Wordpress and Tumblr have
• Users befriending and following other users, but that would be many:many and therefore craziness