This week, you will be in a team of four people working on a project. You should use GitHub issues to keep track of who is working on what, and should use feature branches for development.
Your team's creativity and common sense should be used as you work. There are common features to web applications that users expect. If they are not mentioned in the project's description, you should still do them. For example: in both the microblogging and Question Box applications, users should have avatar images. You don't have to handle file uploads yourself -- you could use Gravatar with django-gravatar -- but you need some way of handling that.
Likewise, come up with your own features to make your project unique. You will likely use this project in your portfolio, so make it stand out!
Each team should try something they don't know how to do on their project. This could be a Python or JavaScript library they haven't used before or a feature of Django or Django REST Framework they haven't tried.
Some ideas:
- Use Django REST Framework Viewsets
- Allow users to authenticate via Google or other third-party auth
- Try Dragula for drag and drop
- Using Vue.js - this is a big lift
You need a good way to manage snippets of code you reuse often. You are going to build a web application that has these goals:
- Registered users can add code snippets.
- Registered users can search their own code snippets and get results quickly. There should be no page reload involved in this search -- you'll need JS and an API.
- Each user has a profile page that shows their public code snippets. Other users can copy a snippet with one click, adding it to their library of snippets.
A snippet has code (required), a language (required), a title (optional), and whatever other fields make sense. Some ideas to consider: a description or a list of tags.
If you copy a snippet by clicking the copy button (or whatever UI element is used for this purpose), there's a link back to the original snippet. The easiest way to do this is with a foreign key. One should be able to see how many times a snippet has been copied.
The reason why we copy snippets instead of "favorite" them is that they can change. The original snippet creator can edit their snippet; the copying user can edit their copy.
Search should look for terms in the title, in other fields like a description or tags, and in the language field. If I search for "javascript auth," I should see any snippets I have about authentication using JavaScript. See search and full text search in the Django documentation for some ideas.
This can vary, but the three parts that definitely need JavaScript are syntax highlighting, search, and copying snippets. Search and copying snippets will also require Ajax endpoints.
For syntax highlighting, check out Prism.js or Highlight.js.
You probably want to add a button to copy a code snippet to your clipboard as well. See this article on native browser copy to clipboard for ideas.
You want to make an application to help people learn via flashcards. You are going to build a web application that has these goals:
- Registered users can create multiple decks of flashcards, each with a prompt or question and an answer.
- Registered users can quiz themselves on a deck.
- Success and failure for each card is recorded.
A user can have multiple decks of flashcards. Each deck has a title. Each flash card has a prompt or question and an answer.
When a user is quizzing themselves on a deck, they do not have to type in answers. They are shown the prompt, they click to see the answer; they then mark whether they answered it correctly or not. They should see one card at a time.
When the user marks success or failure on a card, this should be recorded.
The cards should be shown in a random order at a minimum. A preferable method would be to use something like the Leitner system for flash cards. This system uses review times; you could use that, or just use the idea of multiple boxes, with cards in lower boxes coming up more often.
This application has two very distinct parts -- creating decks and cards and then running through those decks. This is a natural place to split work. Do not forget to make creating decks and cards an easy-to-use experience.
This can vary, but I imagine a lot of it is JavaScript. To show one card at a time without a page reload in between cards will require talking back and forth with an API. Recording whether you answered correctly or not would be another call to the API.
"Flipping" a card (you don't have to animate a card flip, although if you do, that's very cool) will almost certainly require JavaScript.
You could have a page load in between cards and reduce your amount of JavaScript. Depending on how you do this, it could also record success or failure, eliminating most of your JavaScript.
You want to make a platform where you and other users can communicate via short posts. You are going to build a web application that has these goals:
- Registered users can write posts up to 280 characters.
- Any user can view the most recent posts on the site.
- Every registered user has a profile page that shows their posts.
- Registered users can follow other users and see the most recent posts from the people they follow.
Posts have a text body and belong to a user. Posts should not be valid if they are less than 2 characters or greater than 280 characters.
Posts are not editable. They can only be created or destroyed. Only the user that created a post should be able to delete it.
Posts can be responses to other posts. If a post is a response to another post, though, you should see a link to that other post when looking at the response. You should be able to see the number of responses a post has gotten, and you should be able to see all the responses to a post on one page. You do not have to nest responses -- that is, if a response gets a response, you don't have to show that "grandchild response" on the original post's page.
You can do this with a minimal amount of JavaScript, but you can enhance it greatly by adding more. Making pagination in-page -- that is, you either click to see more posts in the same page or have "endless scroll" -- is a priority feature. Being able to respond to a post on the same page with no page load would be great.
One really cool idea you could do with JavaScript is to support oEmbed. jquery-oembed-all or oembed-all are JavaScript libraries that should do this for you.
You want to make an application where people can crowdsource their questions and get answers. You are going to build a web application that has these goals:
- Users can view questions and answers
- Registered users can ask questions
- Registered users can add answers to any question
- The question's creator can mark answers as correct
- Registered users can "star" questions and answers they like
Questions have a title and a body. Allow your users to use Markdown for authoring question bodies. Python-Markdown can turn Markdown into HTML for you. You will also want to prevent people from putting unauthorized HTML into your Markdown code. mdx-bleach is a Python-Markdown extension that looks like it will work. Questions cannot be edited once they have been asked. A question can be deleted by its author. If it is deleted, all associated answers should also be deleted.
Answers just have a body and are connected to a question. Answers can also use Markdown.
Every question and every answer should be associated with a user. A user should be able to view all their questions on a user profile page.
When a user answers a question, the question's author should receive an email with a link to the answer.
Adding answers should happen in the page with no page load, thereby needing Ajax. Likewise, "starring" questions and answers and marking answers as correct should happen via Ajax.
The rest of the application can be plain old Django views, although you can use JavaScript + an API to load questions and answers if you want.