Overview

Here’s the Software Design Document for more information and the project thus far!

Scrum

I’m still figuring out how to improve user navigation for this website, but you can find the scrum board for the project over here.

Background

I can at least start this off by explaining the original motivations behind this project/product. Basically, half a year ago I was interesting in delving into freelance web development in the future. To develop a portfolio and gain a bit of experience, I decided to take up making a portfolio site for a friend. The portfolio was going to be based around illustrations and large images of their artwork. Rather than setting up a github site, I wanted to abstract all the actual code and backend from the client. Also, I wanted the client to be able to upload and rearrange their own portfolio images and content as they pleased without my having them intervene. The idea would be having them log into an admin console with their own account, with permission restricted to their own content and be able to modify content through there. After searching around for free self-hosted CMS’s, the closes thing I’ve found was Strapi, an open source headless CMS. However, the project doesn’t support non admin users for accessing the admin console. They do have plans to support this on their roadmap, but its set to be implemented late 2019. So, I’ve decided to take this idea up as a project, and develop this myself. In addition to these requirements, I’d like to make this a product especially for freelancers self host their own servers and client websites, and allow them to centralize their content for multiple clients.

There are several things I’d like to gain from this project. First, I do have actual plans of utilizing this product in the future, for if I decide to delve more into freelance web development, as well as for mainting content or at least parts of my current jekyll site/blog. Second, I’m taking this oppurtunity to learn more about API development (since this will be technically an API) and software infrastructure. To elaborate on the software infrastruture, I’d like to figure out how to make the project modular enough to support different databases and database solutions. Or at least modular and customizeable enough to streamline it to adapating to other backends. Will this mean I should or shouldn’t create ORM’s and whatnot, I’m not entirely sure yet. In addition, I want to make sure the API will support multiple frontends and query methods. This basically means I need to attempt to support RESTful API’s, GraphQL, SOAP and JSON responses. I’m not entirely sure what exactly needs to be ‘supported’, but I might have to poke around with other common front end frameworks such as Vue.js and React to figure out what should be done.