Welcome to Weddit

Welcome!

In this blog I will be attempting to create a clone of Reddit.com using the PHP framework - Laravel. 

This blog will follow my progress, analysis of code and include any problems encountered along the way, as well as any solutions (If I find any!). 

Disclaimer: Weddit is purely a display of technical ability and as such is not fully GDPR compliant. Furthermore, this application will not be used for commercial or revenue purposes.

The main features of this application will include:

  • Authentication
  • Subweddits (communities containing subweddit-specific posts)
  • Posts (including authorization, validation, CRUD, media upload, likes, comments)
  • Timeline
  • Admin access
  • Guest access
For simplicity - I will ignore some features of reddit.com such as the 'hot' feature - this features takes in to account the popularity of a post coupled with its submission date.

Progress can be tracked on my GitHub account here - https://github.com/ConvertToInt

Sit back and enjoy the (not so smooth) ride!

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Validation

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validation, both serverside and clientside, is essential  for a satisfactory user experience, and for security.  This application makes use of several forms, so it is important that the site be completely tamper-proof. Thankfully, Laravel takes helps the cause, with the @csrf tag, which prevents csrf attacks, or cross-site request forgery. (explain this). validation on the registration is handled largely by the livewire auth package, the only tweak made is validation for the username, which was covered in the auth blog post. which leaves 5 forms to validate: create subweddit create post edit post create comment create reply Client side, all of the validation can be handled by laravel's @error directive, which will quickly determine if there is a validation error in an attribute. The message can be displayed by calling the array $errors. With our Bulma framework, we can make things look a little prettier for the user by changing the form border to red and displaying the red err...
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Views and Policies

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Although maximum functionality is achieved by being a logged in user, it is important to think of guest users browsing the site. Baring that in mind lets run through the abilities guests and users: Guest: Home feed showing most recent posts from all subweddits view subweddit and contents view post and comments sign up User: Log in Personalised home feed Create subweddit Follow Subweddit Create Post Post comment/reply to preface: guest and user views could have been achieved in a cleaner way by creating seperate routes in web.php and stating if the user is logged in, redirect to 'logged-in' views, or otherwise 'guest' views. As my AWS instance is running on micro I chose to slim my application down so as not to overload my tiny server. Thusly, I opted for utilising @auth and @guest in the blade file. Not very clean, but effective and 'cost' efficient Starting with the index page: if the page is viewed by a guest, then display all posts from all subweddits, filter...
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