Community Bulletin Board

An Open-Source, Distributable Community Bulletin Board by Jalen Atkinson, Autumn Fields, Barry Gilreath, and Joseph Pugmire.

Table of Contents

• Overview
• User Story
• Technologies
• Features
• Installation Instructions
• Screenshots and Video
• Future Development
• Links

Overview

For this project, four team members collaborated to conceive, design, and build a full-stack application.  Our team was motivated to provide a place where community members could connect with one another.  According to a recent survey:

- Only 33% of Americans consider their neighbors friends or close friends, whereas 66% consider their neighbors strangers or acquaintances.
- 27% of Americans are active in online neighborhood groups.
- Americans in the Midwest region are most likely to be friends with their neighbors.
- 1 in 4 Americans consider their neighbors strangers.**

Our team wants to help make neighborhoods better by bringing neighbors togehther. To achieve this goal, we designed a helpful, easy-to use community bulletin-board application.  This app is open source and easily distributable for communities to use for their own purposes.  The app features a login / registration system and a chronological view of posts spanning vertically down the site.

** Source: https://www.thezebra.com/resources/home/neighbors-survey/

User Story

As a community member
I WANT to connect with people of my own community
SO THAT I can be informed about community events, read comments from other community members, and share my own thoughts as well.

Technologies

• Javascript
• JQuery
• Handlebars.js
• Express
• Sequelize
• mySql2
• Session
• CSS
• Bootstrap

Features

• A responsive design
• A login / registration system
• A chronological view of posts spanning vertically down the site
• An admin account which can remove posts
• Adding posts
• Like / dislike posts
• Authentication - Server only allows a logged in user to create posts.
• Cache - we will distribute an auth token on login to accomplish this. This token will be cached in the browser so the user retains login through reloads

Installation Instructions

• Edit handlebars files to rebrand with your own community name.

 ./views/home.handlebars (line 9)
 ./views/userhome.handlebars (line 9)

• set custom database password according to .env example

 .env.EXAMPLE

• Ensure you have mySQL installed. Then install mysql server, launch server, set login in .env file

 If you do not currently have mysql installed, check out the documentation here for instructions: 
 https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/getting-mysql.html 

• Open your workspace and terminal then run the following commands:

npm install

node seeds/seed.js

node server.js

• Once you see the message "Now listening on port 3001" you have completed installation and running!

Screenshots and Video

Video Demonstration: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y3xXetazuULoI4Lk81ShgbBdF53XwSwl/view?usp=sharing

Future Development

For future development we plan features such as:

• Different account types (admin, regular)
• Dislike feature toggleable in server settings
• Comment feature to reply to posts
• Sort and filter functions to change the rendered posts

Links

Github Repository

https://github.com/barrygilreath3/community-bulletin-board/

NPM

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@gtbootcampproject2/community-bulletin-board

This project brought to you by:

Jalen Atkinson: https://github.com/JalenAtkinson12

Autumn Fields: https://github.com/autumnlf

Barry Gilreath: https://github.com/barrygilreath3

Joseph Pugmire: https://github.com/jpugmire