Helpme_World

helpme_world is a code-centric help forum for developers and hobbyist programmers of all skill levels to come together, collaborate, learn, and assist each other in their programming journeys. It's main focus is bringing posts to users, but it is designed to be scaled up with more helpful features.

To view the live deployment: https://helpme-world.herokuapp.com/home

General Info
Technologies Used
Features
Setup
Improvements

General Information

helpme_world is a site meant to serve as a platform for developers and hobbyist programmers to get together to ask questions, communicate ideas, and just enjoy the world of coding. They can make an account, which includes a username, email, and profile picture. Once registered, the user can make posts, reply to other posts, and edit or delete their own posts. Posts and replies have the ability to use markdown within them, making code snippets more easily readable. The user can also search for posts, or see posts by a specific user.

My purpose for committing to this project is to show a growth mindset. As the project grows, it showcases the growth of my abilities as a back end developer, allowing me to build upon the foundation I've set before myself. The database design, endpoint routing, proper form handling, and error handling are all skills that I've been working to perfect. I felt the Flask framework was an excellent choice for that, because it requires base knowledge of system design to use. Unlike Django, Flask is of the "explicit over implicit" mentality, meaning if there is a feature or structure the developer wishes to add/follow, they are in charge of configuring it. Django is much more "batteries included," thus I felt Flask would be a better learning experience.

Technologies Used

Flask, including many notable packages
- WTForms for clean form creation/validation
- Flask-Login for user management/endpoint authorization
- Flask-Mail for email service, password reset
- Bcrypt for password hash checking
- Jinja2 templating engine
- SMTP
SQLAlchemy ORM
Local SQLite3 and Postgres databases, migrated to Heroku Postgres via S3 bucket
Bootstrap CSS
Heroku (for deployment)
AWS (S3 for db migration)

Features

User creation with sha256 password hashing
User profile picture customization
Mail server can send password reset email with expiring token
Users can create update or delete their own posts, using markdown to format code
Search by post, view posts by user
Reply to posts

Setup

Ensure python 3.9 is installed.

Install requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Or, access virtual environment:

pip install pipenv
pipenv shell

Creating .env file

For this server to run, you must create a .env file within the package, setting the following parameters:

SECRET_KEY=
SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI=sqlite:///site.db
EMAIL_USER=
EMAIL_PASS=

Set the secret key to whatever you'd like!

Running the Server

python run.py

Viewing the website

Site can be found here: http://127.0.0.1:5000/ (for localhost)

Improvements

Improvements:

The front end is quite basic
Upgrade the testing suite, maybe using Selenium for functional testing
Role guarding pages using @role_required, needs DB refactor

To Do:

Elasticsearch for full-text searching
Implement Redis for caching some slow queries ('LIKE', 'COUNT')
Implement custom input saniziation for forms

bcbecker / helpme-world