Minimum

"Minimum" is a full-stack web application inspired by "Medium". Minimum is built using Ruby on Rails and React/Redux.

Minimum Live

Features and Implementation

Story CRUD

Story CRUD is the main feature of Minimum. It utilizes RESTful Rails API with JSON response format to handle Story CRUD request from users. Each story is stored in the database with id, title, sub_title, content, published (a boolean value to check whether the story is published or not), published_at, parent_id (a foreign key for association to parent story), and author_id (also a foreign key for association to the author) columns in Stories table. Both parent_id and author_id are indexed for the performance improvement.

Creating and Updating Stories

Writing a story is often times not easy. Especially writing a story in one seating is even more difficult. On top of that, forgetting to save your precious works ... Let's not get into that.

Therefore, Minimum provides users with real time draft creates and updates to help the users focus on writing their cool stories without the fear of losing their work. Minimum provides the users with real time draft creates and updates by binding AJAX requests on user inputs, storing the drafts in the database.

• First, Minimum creates a new draft upon user input:

  Upon user inputs, you will notice that the url changes from /new-story to the /:storyId/edit-story:

  

• Second, until you publish through publish button at the top nav bar, it will be just saved as a draft:

  

Publishing and Deleting Stories

• You can publish your story with tags:

  

• You can edit or delete your own story:

  

Comments

In Minimum, everything is a story. Comments are just a story that have parent story associated with parent_id foreign key. Therefore, comments share same database as stories.

• To write comments, you can either choose to write your comments in the comment section, or to get fancy and go full screen mode:

Likes and Tags

For Likes and Tags, Minimum uses join tables (likes for Likes and taggings for Tags). Each join table has two foreign keys with belongs_to associations. Then the tables that have has_many associations to the join table use has_many :through associations to create Likes and Tags.

• Like join table with user_id and story_id foreign keys

class Like < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates :user, :story, presence: true
  validates :user, uniqueness: { scope: :story }

  belongs_to(
    :user,
    class_name: "User",
    foreign_key: :user_id,
    primary_key: :id
  )

  belongs_to(
    :story,
    class_name: "Story",
    foreign_key: :story_id,
    primary_key: :id
  )
end

• With the Like join table, Story can now create has_many :through associations to users

  class Story < ActiveRecord::Base
  
    has_many(
      :likes,
      class_name: "Like",
      foreign_key: :story_id,
      primary_key: :id
    )
  
    has_many(
     :liked_users,
     through: :likes,
     source: :user
    )
  end

• Tag pages:

  

• Toggle likes:

  

Future Features

• Search
• Bookmarks
• Annotations
• Enrich Text Editing
• Infinite Scroll