This application (app) has been designed and coded for the 'Data Centric Development' milestone project in the Full Stack Developer course at the Code Institute.

The app is designed to be a resource for club golfers to use in order to make informed buying decisions on new purchases, share information on golf related gear and generally keep informed of new developments on and off the golf course.

Rather than relying solely on reviews from editors or journalists, All Golf is aimed at providing an open sharing platform for amateur golfers to share their honest opinions on experiences they've had with particular products.

The app is deployed to Heroku and can be accessed here .

Code is stored in my github repository here .

The below criteria were set out by Code Institute as an example project outline to follow. As an avid golfer I wanted to put my own twist on these and create something for which I believe there is a genuine need for in the market.

Build a book review and recommendation site.

Find books they would like to read.

Earn money on each book purchased via a link from the site.

Create a web application that allows users to upload details of books, including book name, author name, link to cover image and any other relevant fields. Allow users to write comments about any book and upvote it.

Create the backend code and frontend form(s) to allow users to add new books and reviews to the site, edit them and delete them.

Add a link such as the following to each book page, such that you could conceivably earn money from people looking to buy the book: https://www.amazon.com/s?tag=faketag&k=alice+in+wonderland Note that we do not actually encourage you to create an affiliate link, but rather want to demonstrate how this could work. Instead, for this project, we encourage you to just keep the tag value as something fake. Also, note that in general it's better to link directly to the book's page in the store, but that's a bit more difficult.

The project criteria specified that MongoDB be used as the database for the project, principally through MongoDB Atlas.

After consideration and some testing, the above databse model was decided upon. This gave a suitably flexible structure to be able to allow users to Create, Read, Update and Delete review documents in their own collection; whilst also being able to select and (in some cases) amend other key value pairs without affecting the review itself.

In particular, this approach helped me to solve a bug where duplicate entries were being inserted into the databse for brand_name and model. By having separate collections I was able to control user inputs and prevent this from happening.

All values were set as strings apart from 'upvote' in the reviews collection. This allowed for incremental python code ('$inc') to be used to create a like function.

There is one text index on the database that allows users to search across title, category, brand or model.

In accordance with CI criteria, the main language used to create the app was Python (version 3.7).

In order to achieve desired functionality extensive use was made of the Flask framework specifically:

1. render_template
2. redirect
3. request
4. url_for
5. session (for login function)
6. flash (for user messaging)
7. Werkzeug Security (for password encryption)
8. bson

The front end was coded using HTML5, CSS and Jinja. Bootstrap 4 was used for styling and layout and responsiveness.

My main design philosophies were:

1. Display information as simply and clearly as possible.
2. Display only relevant information to users.
3. Mobile first
4. Green, Grey, Yellow colour scheme to fit with golfing theme.
5. Help users get to what they want in as few clicks as possible.

There were three main user stories to consider when creating the app.

As a golfer I want to be able to read reviews from golfers with similar interests as me. I want to be able to consume information regarding products I may be interested in purchasing to help my buying decsion.

As a golfer I want to be able to review purchases I've made in order to help others make buying decisions. I want to be able to revisit my reviews and update or delete them in future.

As the owner of the site, I want to be give people a link to gear reviewed by users, so that they can buy the products they like quickly and easily. Moreover, I can monetise these links via a channel partnership to help fund the site.

In order to access the site, users must first register and then login.

This is done via the index.html page, where the user has the option to do either.

If the user tries to login with invalid credentials, they will be sent a message and redirected to the login page.

If the user tries to register with an existing or blank username, they will be sent a message and redirected to the registration page.

If the user tries to register a blank password, they will be sent a message and redirected to the registration page.

Upon logging in successfully, users will be redirected to reviews.html and recieve a confirmation message at the top of the page telling them that they have been successfully logged in.

From here, they can automatically view the top 10 newest reviews left on the page.

Users can filter results while on reviews.html by either category name or brand name to find what they are looking for quickly.

They can cancel all filters by hitting the refresh filters button.

In addition, there is a search bar at the top right of the page that will allow them to perform a quick search. Upon clicking the search button, users will be redirected to search.html. This is a read-only results view.

Users can leave reviews by clicking the 'Contribute' link at the top of the page. This will take them to write.html where they can use the form provided to create their own review.

The selectors are linked to the relevant collections in the databse so the user can select these from a dropdown. If a particular brand or model isn't present in the list, the user can insert them using the 'add' buttons and continue with their review.

If the user attempts to add a brand or modal already in the database, they will be informed that it already exists and redirected to write.html again.

Once submitted, the user will be redirected to reviews.html where they can see their review. If no image url was provided, the image will be a default image set by allgolfeverything.

Users can update/edit/delete their own reviews by clicking the edit or delete button at the bottom of any review. If they try to edit someone else's review, they will recieve a message stating that they can't do that and redirected to reviews.html.

If they try to edit their own review, they will be redirected to editreview.html where they can make any changes, hit submit and be redirected back to reviews.html where they can see their updated review.

If they delete their own review, they will recieve a confirmation of the action and be redirected back to review.html.

Users can like any post by hitting the like button. This increments the upvote key for that review and refreshes the page.

The user can see that the like(s) total will have incremented by one.

Users can click on the 'american golf' logo to be sent to their page for that particular brand.

This is not intended to be a fully realised affiliate link, rather it is an academic proof of concept as to how it may work in a real world commercial environment.

The project was tested manually across 3 categories:

1. Login, Authentication and Registration
2. CRUD
3. Defensive

Please see the results of testing here

Responsiveness was tested on Apple iPhone X, iPad, Samsung Galaxy S8 and Apple iPhone 5s.

Below are some bugs/issues that I encountered during development.

Building upvoting functionality.

User would submit a review, upvote key would insert automatically and when 'Like' button was clicked count would increment by 1.

User would submit a review, upvote key would insert automatically as a string. When 'Like' button was clicked error recieved as function could not increment a string.

MongoDB submits values as strings by default if no other data type is specified. When '$inc' is then called on the value later, it raises an error because it can only be called on an integer.

The solution is to add 'int' to request.form.get('upvote') when the review is created so that the value is set as an integer and the 'upvote' funtion will work when called.

Building filter functions for reviews.

User would select category, brand or both from dropdown and click 'Filter' button to see specfied results. Results would show on page as expected with filters applied.

User would only be able to filter by brand, additional filters weren't applied.

In order to solve this issue, I had to create a nested elif function in filter_reviews which allowed for the proper checks to be completed on each form inuput before going to the next stage.

The steps the function now follows are below:

For additional functionality beyond the lesson code, the following proved very useful resources throughout the development process.

1. Flask Login - Corey Schafer
2. Flask Messaging - Pretty Printed
3. Flask Security- Pretty Printed
4. Lead Sessions - Miroslav Svec
5. MongoDB - Kristina Chodorow
6. MongoDB Tutorial - Coding Simplified
7. Stack Overflow
8. Python Query Filters - Pretty Printed
9. Python - Timothy Needham

In general, the Code Institute Slack channel has been an invaluable resource to search through for ideas on how to solve problems.

In addition, thanks are owed to the CI tutors for their patience in helping me solve coding problems and encouraging me to find answers to issues.

As the site grows, it will be necessary to implement some new features not included in the scope of this project.

The list below is not exhaustive and will be added to over time in order to keep the site viable.

1. Password retrieval and reset function.
2. User Profiles.
3. Image hosting.
4. Fully functioning affiliate links.
5. Additional filters