TextRealm

Buying and selling textbooks, made easy.

The Site:

Update! The site may no longer be active after a certain time. We apologize for the inconvenience.

You can find our deployed site here.

The Team:

Overview
User Guide
Developer Guide
Project Development History
Next Steps and User Feedback

Overview

TextRealm is a web application where UH students can easily buy and sell their textbooks to other UH students. We hope to develop a working application, in which the student can login to their account, or sign up for an account, and fill out the necessary information for their profile. The user can buy textbooks by searching for textbooks based on their ISBN number, title, or author, and contacting the seller, or they can set up offers for textbooks that they plan to sell by supplying the ISBN number which will be used to match up buyers and sellers as well as other information about the textbook.

We plan to implement the following items:

A landing page that asks the user to sign-up or login
A rating system that allows buyers and sellers to rate each other based on their experience
A profile page that lists the textbooks that the user is selling
- Includes user’s name, a description, a way for other users to contact them, and profile picture
Users will be able to apply details and notes to their entries, such as the class it can be used for, details on the condition, and any other information related to the textbook
A search page that allows the user to search for the textbook based on the either the author, ISBN number, or title
Admin role, which will allow them to delete entries and ban users for inappropriate entries
A page listing user reviews on their buying experience with another user

We plan to make this application using:

Meteor for Javascript-based implementation of client and server code.
React for component-based UI implementation and routing.
Semantic UI React CSS Framework for UI design.
Uniforms for React and Semantic UI-based form design and display.

User Guide

This section provides a walkthrough of the TextRealm user interface and its capabilities.

Landing Page

You can find our landing page here. The landing page is presented to users when they visit the top-level URL to the site.

Register Page

The user can register an account if they are not already registered by clicking the ‘Sign Up’ option in the Nav Bar. From there, they must fill out the required fields to create an account. Only students in the UH system may be able to register.

Returning users can login to the system by clicking on the ‘Login’ option in the Nav Bar, and inputting their email and password.

When the user is logged in, they will land on the page that will allow them to sell their textbooks.

Sell A Textbook

Once you are logged in, you will be redirected to the ‘Sell A Textbook’ page where you can start selling your textbooks! If you are selling a textbook, you must click on the ‘Sell A Textbook’ option in the Nav Bar, and you must fill in the fields for a textbook that you plan on selling.

Upon adding an entry, the entry will appear on your profile. You have the ability to either edit an entry, or delete an entry.

Edit Entry

You can edit the information on the textbooks that you are selling.

Edit Profile

Once you are logged in, you can edit/update your information on your profile.

Search

To search for the textbook that you want to buy, clicking on the ‘Search For Books’ option in the menu bar will take you to the search page which lists available books. You can search by author, ISBN-10, and by title, and the search will display books whose information is relevant to your search. The following screenshots show how you can narrow down your search by searching for the author, ISBN-10, or title of the book.

The search page:

For example, searching by author:

Or, you can search by ISBN-10:

Or, you can search by title:

If there are no entries pertaining to your search, then you will be greeted by a ‘No results.’

Profile of a Book

When you see the book that you need, you can click on the ‘View More’ option, which will pull up all of the information about the book. If this is the book that you are looking for, you can email the seller as their email is listed with the entry.

User Reviews

When you purchase a book from a user on the site, you can comment about and rate your experience! By going to the ‘Add A User Review’ option in the menu bar, you can rate your experience with buying from a user by scoring it out of 5 stars and providing comments about your experience.

You can view all of the user reviews in the ‘User Reviews’ option in the menu bar, which displays reviews from users about purchases done with other users on the site.

Admin Role

Users with the admin role will have access to all of the textbooks in the database. If there is an entry that is deemed to be inappropriate, the admin can delete the entry. Admins can email the owners of these inappropriate entries and ban them for any inappropriate conduct on the site.

Developer Guide

This section provides information of interest to Meteor developers wishing to use this code base as a basis for their own development tasks.

Installation

First, install Meteor.

Second, visit the TextRealm application GitHub page and click the “Use this template” button to create your own repository initialized with a copy of this application. Alternatively, you can download the sources as a zip file or make a fork of the repo. Then, download a copy of the repo to your local computer.

Third, cd into the text-realm/app directory and install libraries with:

$ meteor npm install

Fourth, run the system with:

$ meteor npm run start

If it all goes well, the application will appear at http://localhost:3000.

Initialization

The config directory is intended to hold settings files. The repository contains one file: config/settings.development.json.

This file contains default definitions for Users, Textbook Entries, and Ratings/Reviews and the relationships between them.

The settings.development.json file contains a field called “loadAssetsFile”. It is set to false, but if you change it to true, then the data in the file app/private/data.json will also be loaded. The code to do this illustrates how to initialize a system when the initial data exceeds the size limitations for the settings file.

Quality Assurance

ESLint

TextRealm includes a .eslintrc file to define the coding style adhered to in this application. You can invoke ESLint from the command line as follows:

meteor npm run lint

ESLint should run without generating any errors.

It’s significantly easier to do development with ESLint integrated directly into your IDE (such as IntelliJ).

Project Development History:

Mockups

The following items are some of the mockups of pages that we had planned for this application.