Feddit | Nechama Bergman

Feddit is a Reddit replica where users can post, vote on, share and save family-friendly links and comments.

Overview

I developed Feddit during the guided phase of Bloc’s Rails Web Development Apprenticeship. Each feature of this application was introduced as an opportunity to explore another aspect of Rails application development. Like Reddit, Feddit is an application where users to create, vote on, and share posts; Feddit also incorporates robust application features such as image and email integration to make for a complete, well-rounded product.

Integrated Gems and Services

Devise - User Authentication
Figaro - Secure App Configuration/safely store and access sensitive credentials
Bootstrap - Front-end Framework (HTML, Javascript)
Pundit - User Authorization
Faker - Generating fake data for testing
Sendgrid - Cloud-based email infrastructure
RedCarpet - Allow users to style with markdown
Amazon S3 - Image Storage
CarrierWave - File uploading
ImageMagick - Editing and converting images
WillPaginate - Pagination library
RSpec - Testing Framework
Factory Girl - Generating Test Factories
Capybara - Simulating user interaction for testing

User Stories

As a user, I want to sign up for a free account by providing a user name, password and email
As a user, I want to sign in and out of Feddit
As a user, I want to see an index of all topics and their posts
As a user, I want to see an index of all posts and their comments
As a user, I want to create multiple topics, posts and comments
As a user, I want to be the only one allowed to delete and update my topics and posts
As a user, I want to “like and unlike” posts created by other users
As a user, I want to see a list on my personal profile of the posts and comments that I’ve created
As a developer, I want to seed the development database automatically with topics, posts and comments
As a developer, I want to validate that posts meet specific requirements (length etc.)
As a user, I want to use markdown syntax to format my posts
As a developer, I want to display posts using any Markdown formatting
As a user I want to upload a profile picture to Feddit
As a developer, I want to paginate results
As a user, I want to upvote and downvote posts
As a user, I want the ability to flag a post as a “favorite”
As a user, I want to receive an email when a new comment is added to a post that I favorited
As a user, I want the option to opt in or out of receiving emails from Feddit
As a user, I want to see public and private topics and navigate to a private topic’s URL
As a visitor, I do not want to see private topics or navigate to a private topic’s URL
As a user, I want to be redirected to the index of topics after I sign-in
As a user, if I previously voted, I want to see the up/down arrow icon to reflect that they I voted
As a visitor, I want to see a user’s information, posts, and comments on the user’s profile page
As a user, I want to see a page that displays active posts from the past 7 days
As a user, I want to see a page that displays the most active users (ranked by the number of posts plus comments that users have created)

Conclusion

Developing this application was an important step for me in learning how to build a robust web application. In addition to learning basic development principles and practices, I learned more advanced development techniques such as: user authentication and authorization, sending custom emails with ActionMailer, scoping, integrating ajax to increase page performance, nesting resources and routes, pagination, seeding a development database, application deployment, model validations, simple and complex model relationships (including polymorphism), image uploading and hosting, and TDD principles.