Django Web-App for managing courses/users. BlogMatter takes your Markdown Content, renders it into a HTML templates, and spits out a complete, Dynamic Blog ready to be served by Heroku, Nginx or another web server.

• Fast deployment via heroku
• Completely Free
• Custom Blog Models
• Integrated Heroku-PostGreSQL
• Syntax Highlighting for course-content (you can add code to the course content via markdown!)

• Set up the repo
• Read up on the configuration
• Create a superuser for Django admin Panel
• Fork/Contribute your own modifications (Optional)

You could also leverage a virtual environment (Highly recommended)

python3 -r venv <repo name>
source <repo name>/bin/activate

Set up the repo:

git clone https://github.com/ss4328/CourseMatter.git
pip install -r requirements.txt 
cd CourseMatter
python manage.py runserver
# => Starting development server at http://127.0.0.1:8000/

All settings are managed via CourseMatter/settings.py

• Markdownify's flag settings
• Static File Directories (Set up in STATIC_URL variable)
• To make DB migrations,

python manage.py migrate

From the root directory (where manage.py resides), run:

python manage.py createsuperuser 

Expected Flow:

Enter your desired username and press enter.
Username: admin
Email address: [email protected]
Password: **********
Password (again): *********
Superuser created successfully.

Note: I used admin, admin as user,password for simplicity. You can try to log in with that if the SQLite DB is committed in the end.

After creating some a content object (manually you can navigate to /add_content), you can click on the tag and then navigate to all the posts available for the tag.

I think the easiest option to go along is to host on Heroku. Why?

• We've already set up the Procfile in the project with auto migration build support.
• It's as easy as:

brew install heroku/brew/heroku
heroku login
=> heroku: Press any key to open up the browser to login or q to exit
 ›   Warning: If browser does not open, visit
 ›   https://cli-auth.heroku.com/auth/browser/***
=> heroku: Waiting for login...
=> Logging in... done
=> Logged in as [email protected]
heroku create
git push heroku master
heroku open

• Production logs are easily viewable

heroku logs --tail

• Migrations are easy on the server

heroku python manage.py makemigrations
heroku python manage.py migrate

Optionally now you could do some simple DNS Setup if you've a custom domain.

Home Page

admin panel

content-detail

course-detail

dashboard

edit-Profile

login/Signup

tag-view

• I used Django for Back-end for the following reasons:

  • Allows integrated admin panel to save development time
  • Very friendly support for user management
  • In built view rendering forms which I used liberally
  • Very easy-to-frame query inspection by manage.py dbshell
  • In-build user groups.
  • Django uses MVC, which is very powerful pattern. You call the Controller the “view”, and the View the “template”
    • In mvt, a request to a URL is dispatched to a View. This View calls into the Model, performs manipulations and prepares data for output. The data is passed to a Template that is rendered an emitted as a response. ideally in web frameworks, the controller is hidden from view.

• And I used Bootstrap Framework for the front-end. I'm proficient in React which could have been used to improve performance and code readability. However, Bootstrap is very dev-friendly and quick to use and create.

  • Allows for Responsive UI which is VERY nice to have.
  • Amazing documentation and community.
  • Traded off performance for development speed.

• Heroku for Deployment: Very nice support for PostGreSQL and very easy deployment.

• PostGreSQL - object-relational database, table inheritance and function overloading which although not used much, are amazing for later stages of the product and allow more flexibility & relational features.

For all purposes, Author is just an alias for a teacher

• CRUD for course, CRUD for Course Content
• Integrated Markdown support to allow:
  • Photos via markdown
  • Videos via markdown
  • Code via markdown
  • Tables via markdown
• Custom Course and Content Model via one-to-many relationship
• Pagination for course/content pages
• Only the author of the course/content or Admin can change course content.
• Search for course/content on admin Django Admin panel via content/title.

• Login/Signup View for users
• Integrated django-admin panel that allows Admin to escalate priveleges for any user by assigning teacherGroup.
• User Groups: Teacher
  • Teacher can edit/add/delete course and content
  • Cascade on courses and users
    • When a course is deleted, the subsequent content is deleted
    • When a user is deleted, all his/her content is deleted (can be changed with a DB migration by removing cascade option)
  • Edit Profile page (some fixes needed but shows I can easily made those changes working full-time)
• Enhanced User model for additional profile attributes: DOB, Country, first_name & last_name.
• Search for a user by name.
• Search by profile details.

• Home view: Gives recent posts by reverse-chronological sorted order, Content by tag, Course list.
• Author View: View all courses and subsequent content by a particular Author, for all Authors (with edit/delete button if you're the author).
• Login/Signup/forgot password/edit profile/ dashboard by the top-right dropdown menu.
• Course-View: See all content of a course (with edit/delete button if you're the author)
• Tag View: - View all courses and subsequent content by tag (Eg: Python is tagged in Computer-Science) and Content.

• Simplistic, yet elegant UI via bootstrap framework (Although not a requirement, I couldn't do the development justice without a UI to show potential)
• Custom made templates that are very generic to be used in multiple pages.
• Edit/Delete button beside author's own posts. Allows for easy updates or deletions.

• Heroku Deployment Instructions, procfile, etc to allow extremely fast hosting (I've done it previously for my blog)
• Comments in code are breakdown by CRUD functionalities.

• I started off with creating model for content and setting up the homepage.
  • Allowing Markdown-rendering in the model itself is extremely powerful! Although users must be familiar with the syntax, it's not hard to catch.
  • The tradeoff is: Syntax for flexibility. Markdown allows for embedding photos, videos, tables, hyperlinks, presentations (github/gnab/remark), & CODE!
  • I wanted to make something unique & Flexible. Markdown in my opinion is perfect for flexibility and the intergration is sure to be unique!
• Then a custom User Model -> Country, DOB, user name
  • Allows for later features to filter users
• one-to-many Course-to-Content. Allows very fast lookup for content for a course.
• PostGreSQL (read tech-stack section)

• Log in as Admin
  • test if the admin,admin credentials work or create new superuser
• Register several users: A,B,C,D
• Log in to django admin panel
  • Go to usergroups
    • Assign A,B as teachers
  • (Don't assign C,D in teacherGroup)
• Now dashboard accessible from top-right menu for A,B (but not for C,D)
• You can now add content and courses for C,D along with Tags

Verification

• Tags show up as categories on the sidebar
• Courses show up on homepage and courseView
• Content Show up on the assigned Courses
• Edit/Delete buttons are only available for authenticated teachers on their own content and dashboard is invisible for students.

Bug Alert!

• You've to add atleast one content in a course to allow django to display its attributes on the course page
  • Easily fixable by passing course context data in a context dictionary as done in the homepage
  • Left bug for time constraints

• Revamp on React.js
• Images support for the content

• Filter Users by their profile attributes (Eg. Country)
• Questions integration! Let's make a integration for questions and quizzes in addition to content in a course!
  • I've made an extensive Testing system for Java supporting: Multiple choice, True/False, Matches, Multiple-correct, short and long answer based questions
  • Repo:
  • Converting to python or having an adapter to translate requests would be perfect!
• Extended user Profile:
  • Twitter/Youtube integration to allow quick linking
  • Current Level, University/School
• Course Recommendation Algorithm: Based on the courses user is interested in, we can suggest similar to user and link similar courses on a course-detail view page
• Discus integration for comments.
• Ratings for courses and Content.
  • I've made a commenting system for Versa
• Subscription functionalities & Payment integration via Strips
• End to End unit tests

• Docker containerization.
  • I have experience in this
• ECS deployment rather than heroku for the application
• Separate PostGreSQL instance on AWS with consistent backups

1. https://blog.usejournal.com/deploying-django-to-heroku-connecting-heroku-postgres-fcc960d290d1
2. https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/django-app-configuration

##Technical Questions:

• I used Django for Back-end for the following reasons:

  • Allows integrated admin panel to save development time
  • Very friendly support for user management
  • In built view rendering forms which I used liberally
  • Very easy-to-frame query inspection by manage.py dbshell
  • In-build user groups.
  • Django uses MVC, which is very powerful pattern. You call the Controller the “view”, and the View the “template”
    • In mvt, a request to a URL is dispatched to a View. This View calls into the Model, performs manipulations and prepares data for output. The data is passed to a Template that is rendered an emitted as a response. ideally in web frameworks, the controller is hidden from view.

• And I used Bootstrap Framework for the front-end. I'm proficient in React which could have been used to improve performance and code readability. However, Bootstrap is very dev-friendly and quick to use and create.

  • Allows for Responsive UI which is VERY nice to have.
  • Amazing documentation and community.
  • Traded off performance for development speed.

• Heroku for Deployment: Very nice support for PostGreSQL and very easy deployment.

• PostGreSQL - object-relational database, table inheritance and function overloading which although not used much, are amazing for later stages of the product and allow more flexibility & relational features.

After cloning the repo,

cd courseMatter
python manage.py runserver

I had an incredibly busy last 10 days with Capstone project Versa so my availability has been very tight. I managed to devote around 8 hours for this project.

I'd do parts of the backend (everything but payment integration and recommendation algorithm) if I had more time. I'd finish the Infrastructure improvements for sure within extra couple hours.

I'm a huge python fan! I'm enjoying the latest dictionary updates in python 3.9.0

pycon = {2016: "Portland", 2018: "Cleveland"}
europython = {2017: "Rimini", 2018: "Edinburgh", 2019: "Basel"}

{**pycon, **europython}
{2016: 'Portland', 2018: 'Edinburgh', 2017: 'Rimini', 2019: 'Basel'}

merged = pycon.copy()
for key, value in europython.items():
     merged[key] = value

merged
{2016: 'Portland', 2018: 'Edinburgh', 2017: 'Rimini', 2019: 'Basel'}

I had to work with production issues in my coop at SIG. I'd host my code on AWS and check the logs about the requests which were accepted/denied/served and check if there's a pending issue or discrepancies on the metrics. Usually, CI/CD infrastructure catches code issues before they are merged. I'd add test cases for concurrency & performance so sub-par code isn't committed.

• N/A