Talk about it. Learn about it.
- 💎 Features
- 🚀 Getting Started
- 🛠️ Technologies and Design Patterns
- 📦 Nuget Packages
- 📊 ER Diagram
- 📸 Screenshots
- 🪪 License
If you find this project useful or interesting, please consider giving it a star. Thank you! 🤗
TopicTalks is an educational discussion platform designed to foster knowledge sharing between students and teachers. Here's a look at its key features:
- Q&A at its finest: Ask questions, receive answers from teachers or peers, and engage in threaded discussions for in-depth exploration.
- Always informed: Stay up-to-date with email notifications for new replies and discussion thread activity.
- Offline access: Export discussions with question and user details as PDFs for easy offline reference.
- Data in your hands: Export user lists with details in Excel format.
- Secured and permissioned: Role-based authorization ensures a safe and controlled environment for all users.
- A joy to use: Experience a user-friendly interface with a pixel-perfect design that prioritizes both form and function.
And much more! Explore additional functionalities designed to enrich educational discussions and learning experience.
- .NET 8 SDK (or higher)
- Microsoft SQL Server
- JetBrains Rider (edu), Visual Studio, or VS Code
gh repo clone Raofin/TopicTalks
✅ Free forever.
After researching free cloud storage options, Google Drive storage through Google Cloud seemed to be the best fit for this project. Given the limited resources available on the internet for interacting with the Google Drive APIs, it took me a while to understand and implement the functionalities.
However, in order for the project to run with full functionality, you'll need to have your own Google Drive API credentials inserted in the GoogleCredentials.json. Here are the steps to follow to create a free Google Cloud project and get the credentials 🔽
- Create a project in the Google Cloud Console
- Enable Google Drive API for the project
- Select
Create Credentials
- Select
Application Data-> ClickNext
- Fill out the details -> Select
Ownerin Role -> ClickDone
- Go to Service Accounts -> Select the newly created service account
- Select
Keys-> ClickAdd Key-> Choose JSON -> ClickCreate
(The credentialsjsonfile should be automatically downloaded)
- Open the file and copy the value of
client_email - Go to Google Drive -> Create a folder named
TopicTalks - Share the folder with the
client_email
- Finally, paste everything from the downloaded
jsonfile into GoogleCredentials.json - Star this project
The project is configured to automatically apply migrations with some seed data on its first run. To create a database with more data, including the beautiful user portraits and question covers, execute the TopicTalks.sql script. You can manually apply migrations using the following commands:
- For Package Manager 👇
Update-Database -Context AppDbContext -Project TopicTalks.Infrastructure -StartupProject TopicTalks.Api
- For CLI 👇
dotnet ef database update --project TopicTalks.Infrastructure/TopicTalks.Infrastructure.csproj --startup-project TopicTalks.Api/TopicTalks.Api.csproj
🌻 Useful Commands
Add-Migration Init -Context AppDbContext -Project TopicTalks.Infrastructure -StartupProject TopicTalks.ApiRemove-Migration -Project TopicTalks.Infrastructure -StartupProject TopicTalks.Api -ForceUpdate-Database -Context AppDbContext -Project TopicTalks.Infrastructure -StartupProject TopicTalks.ApiUpdate-Database -Migration Init -Context AppDbContext -Project TopicTalks.Infrastructure -StartupProject TopicTalks.ApiTo use Gmail's smtp server, you will need to use an app password. Note that this requires having 2-step verification enabled in your account.
Use the following Commands to store the credentials in user secrets 👇
dotnet user-secrets --project src/TopicTalks.Api set EmailSettings:Email you@gmail.com
dotnet user-secrets --project src/TopicTalks.Api set EmailSettings:Password your-passwordIf you are using a different server, set the server and port as well accordingly.
cd TopicTalks/src
dotnet build TopicTalks.Api/TopicTalks.Api.csproj
dotnet build TopicTalks.Web/TopicTalks.Web.csproj
dotnet run --project TopicTalks.Api/TopicTalks.Api.csproj --urls "https://localhost:9998"dotnet run --project TopicTalks.Web/TopicTalks.Web.csproj --urls "https://localhost:9999"
- API: https://localhost:9998
- Web: https://localhost:9999
- ASP.NET Core 8.0 Web API
- ASP.NET Core 8.0 MVC
- Entity Framework Core 8.0
- Microsoft SQL Server
- jQuery
- jQuery Validate
- Bootstrap 5
- Popper.js
- Tippy.js
- FontFace Observer
- Clean Architecture 🦾
- Result Pattern
- Database Code First Approach with Fluent API
- Repository Pattern
- Unit of Work (UoW)
| Package Name | Used to 👇 |
|---|---|
| Swashbuckle | Generate API documentation from Web API controllers |
| ErrorOr | Handle errors and return results efficiently |
| Serilog | Log events in a very structured way |
| FluentValidation | Apply server-side data validation rules |
| FluentEmail | Send emails using SMTP servers |
| Google Apis | Interact with cloud storage |
| RazorTemplating | Render .cshtml files into string |
| DinkToPdf | Generate beautiful PDFs from HTML |
| ClosedXML | Generate Excel (.xlsx) files |
| WebOptimizer | Bundle and minify CSS & JavaScript files for faster loading |
| WebMarkupMin | Minify MVC HTML content to reduce file size for improved performance |
View at 👉 be.net/TopicTalks
Distributed under the BSD 3-Clause License. See LICENSE for more information.