AceBook

A Facebook-inspired social messaging platform, where users can post their thoughts, and like and comment on posts.

About the app

This was a team project built in two weeks as part of the Makers Academy coding bootcamp. The brief was to create a Facebook clone using Ruby on Rails, a framework new to all of us. We were given a Rails project skeleton to work from.

To develop the app, we followed the client requirements in deciding what features to focus on. We took advantage of several existing gems (libraries) to simplify our work.

• Devise for users and user authentication
• Acts-as-favoritor for the Likes functionality
• Commontator for adding Comments to posts
• jQuery for dynamically adding Likes and Comments without reloading the page
• pg / PostgreSQL database to allow deployment on Heroku
• Bootstrap for styling

The deployed app is here.

The colour scheme was developed using Coolors and the logo was made with Canva.

No further development is planned for this app.

Using the app

Try out Acebook here.

On arriving at the homepage, users are asked to sign in or register. Non-signed in users can't see any posts. [homepage if not logged in] [registration page]

After registration, users see a page of interesting posts. [posts page]

The user can post their own messages as well. If they change their mind about what to say, there's a 10 minute window in which to edit the post. Otherwise, it's always possible to delete one's own posts. But never possible to delete or edit someone else's. [new post page] [posts page with own post]

They can like a post (one Like per post) or add a comment. Likes and comments are added dynamically. [liked a post] [commenting on post] [new comment showing]

Installation and development

This project was written using Ruby v2.7.2 and Rails 5.1.1.
To run the code you will need to have Node.js installed as well as Bundler.

To run locally:

1. Clone this repo onto your own machine.
2. Run $ bundle install to install the required gems.
3. Run $ rails db:create to create the PostgreSQL databases.
4. Run $ rails db:schema:load to create the database tables.
5. Run $ rails server to run the project locally on localhost:3000.

To run tests:

1. Run $ rspec after the database creation to run the test suite.

Known issues

This app has been tested on desktop browsers (Chrome v88, Firefox v85) and is not optimised for mobile browers. The Sign out button is not visible on mobile.