Suggestion App - Laravel Framework

This project was part of a (back-end) course of the University of Applied Sciences Rotterdam. It was the first time working with a framework. I built a suggestion app where users can leave comments and vote on suggestions. It also comes with various Admin features.

Live application: https://iettech.nl/ (2022)

Tech Stack

Client: Vanilla Javascript, Bootstrap, Blade, Vite

Server: Node, Laravel Framework (PHP), MySQL

Features

• User can create, edit, delete, see other suggestions
• User must have liked or reacted to three different posts before they may post something
• User can like other suggestions
• Users can filter based on category, tags, search field and order (most popular or most recent)
• Admins can set categories to inactive (which hides it from the public) and add new ones
• Admins can manage profiles
• Admins can change the status of suggestions, which will trigger an e-mail to be sent to the user and a Trello card to be made on the configured board (user does not have to wait for this to go through, thanks to Laravel's queue system)

Lessons Learned

This was my first app using a framework in general. I have learned to:

• Work with the Laravel framework
• Implement basic CRUD functionalities
• Work with controllers/models/routes
• Implement many-to-many and one-to-many relationships within the project (suggestions can have multiple tags, it is also possible to filter based on tags)
• Combine different filters at the same time (category filter, order filter and search field)
• Make AJAX calls to add functionalities like liking a post, toggling active state of a category without having to reload the page
• Work with Laravel concepts like queues, gates, policies, query scopes, storage
• Work with an e-mail API (MailTrap)
• Work with Trello / Minecraft's APIs

This was the first time I got to deploy an application and learn about CI/CD concepts. I was able to automate the deployment through GitHub Actions. This was a painful process but paid off in the end.

Future additions

Due to the lack of time there are plenty of things that I was not able to implement. In the future I might want to add the following:

• Changelog of updates done
• Discord integration
• Notification center
• Badge system

Screenshots

Run Locally

Clone the project

  git clone https://github.com/Isissss/Laravel-Suggestion-App

Go to the project directory

  cd my-project

Install dependencies

  npm install
  composer install

Create DB and import tables

  php artisan migrate

Start the server

  npm run dev
  php artisan serve