Agora Blog App

Agora blog is a basic blog application implemented in Ruby on Rails as a backend and Bootstrap for the frontend. Time to complete the project: 5 days.

The application is deployed on heroku and can be accessed by clicking the following link: Agora blog

Intro

This is how my landing page looks like

Fig. 1 home page

If you are a visitor of the blog than the only actions allowed are:

1. Listing all articles: This action is available on the top navigation bar by clicking on the link articles.

2. Listing all users: This action is available on the navigation menu by clicking on the link users.

3. Filtering the articles by category: this action is available by clicking on the category drop-down menu next to the search box.

If you want to create an account or sign in, go to the sign up or sign in tab. Once logged in, the server redirects to the user's profile page.

Fig. 2 user's profile page

The profile's page display all the articles created by the user and allows to edit and delete them.

The user can create a new article by clicking on the actions dropdown menu on the navigation bar.

Fig. 3 Create article

The form in Fig. 3 allows the user to write a title and content of the article. It also allows to associate categories to the article that are created in the system.

Lastly, the system implements the administrator functionality. The administrator can edit and delete user's account. Moreover, the administrator is allowed to edit and create new categories in the blog.

System design

Data Base design

Fig. 4 ERD MODEL

Fig. 4 illustrates the ERD (Entity Relation Diagram) of the model. The model includes three tables. The associations are:

• One user has many (or no) articles.
• An article belongs to a single user.
• An article has many (or no) categories.
• A category has many (or no) articles.

Rails MVC

Fig. 5

...

Technologies and features

Ruby version ruby 2.6.3p62 (2019-04-16 revision 67580) [x86_64-darwin18]. The libraries used in this project are located in the Gemfile. To install the libraries, run the command $ bundle in the shell.

• To use bootstrap for styling in the views:

gem "jquery-rails", "~> 4.3"
gem 'bootstrap-sass', '~> 3.3.7'

• To encrypt the user's password:

gem 'bcrypt', '~> 3.1.7'

• To install the pagination feature:

gem 'will_paginate', git: 'https://github.com/mislav/will_paginate'

To use the pagination in the views, include the following code in the controller. e.g : articles_controller.rb

def index
# or, use an explicit "per page" limit:
  @articles = Article.paginate(page: params[:page], per_page: 5)
end

And the following snippet code in the views/article/index.html.erb

<div align="center">
  <%= will_paginate @articles %>
</div>

• To display the user's profile image, use the server called gravatar. You can associate an image with your email address. To grab the user's profile image from this website include the following code in your user's view. e.g views/users/show.html.erb

<%= gravatar_for @user, size: 150 %>

The gravatar_for method is defined in the helpers/application_helper.rb

Acknowledgement

I'm extremely grateful to the GA's instructors: Joel and Rashida for their valuable help. I would also express my gratitude to all my classmates (SEI33) for the great time spent together.

Future Feature

• Add followers and followed to each user.
• Add likes and comments to articles.
• Add forum and chat to private channels.