WOM (Word of Mouth)

Word of Mouth is a full-stack application in which users can post reviews of whatever they want and share them with close-knit communities like families, friends, or coworkers.

Access Site Here

How It's Made:

Tech used: Html, Css, JavaScript, Ejs, Node.js, Express, MongoDB, Cloudinary, Passport

Optimizations

• Adding a friends feature. Currently users are only able to interact within groups

Lessons Learned:

Group Organization & Mongoose .populate method

Organizing users into groups one of the biggest barriers in the development of this application. MongoDB is lacking in the area of joining documents/models together. In order to get around this I read up on the mongoose populate method which ended up solving my problem. I was able to tie specific groups with the users that are members of those specific groups and then use the .populate mongoose method to expand each User's data to have access to it in my views. For each user that is a member of a specific group, I then use .populate to expand and access the data of each review/post that user has made. Using .populate allowed me to display members of each group on the group page as well as each member's most recent review/post.

Package dependencies

bcrypt, cloudinary, connect-mongo, dotenv, ejs, express, express-flash, express-session, method-override, mongodb, mongoose, morgan, multer, nodemon, passport, passport-local, validator, xmlhttprequest, tailwindcss, daisyui

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Using this app yourself

Installation

1. Fork this repository and clone it down to your machine
2. Open terminal in directory and npm install
3. Add the list of things below to your .env file
4. To run the application type npm start in your terminal

Things to add

• Create a .env file in config folder and add the following as key = value
  • PORT = 2121 (can be any port example: 3000)
  • DB_STRING = your database URI
  • CLOUD_NAME = your cloudinary cloud name
  • API_KEY = your cloudinary api key
  • API_SECRET = your cloudinary api secret