GalleXy

An internet presence for the amazing projects created by students here at MIT. A gallery website for displaying projects for public consumption. To be used by ProjX and HackMIT.

Features

• A full gallery view with individual project pages.
• Profile and Check In system for individual teams.
• Authentication supporting profile system, along with MIT Certificate verification to allow for MIT Students
• Author/Team pages for letting project creators show off.

Developers

• Angel Alvarez
• Emily Liu

Goals

• populate database by allowing users (project teams) to provide check-in data
• populate database with admin check-in system

Getting started

After you download the code from this repository, your going to want to do the following things:

1. Make sure to npm install in the repo, and that the NodeJS you have installed is later than 6.0.0 (For email support).
2. Create a settings.js file and database folder in the /server folder. * Your settings folder should look like this:

module.exports = {
  mongoUri: "data", /*RELATIVE TO THE Project location if using gulp and localhost*/
  mongoHost: "mongodb://localhost/",
  winMachine: false,  /* whether or not the computer is running windows, or linux/mac OS. This affects the automation of the tasks.*/
  port:3000,  /* PORT TO RUN THE SERVER, use 80 or 8080 for HTTP */
  secret: "7928xj9kd01xj0x9mu98ex", /* Secret used to create sessions. keep secret. */
  admins: ['alvareza@mit.edu'], /*you can define admins for the website using their emails. */
  verificationExpiration: 86400000, /* sets in seconds how long you want to wait for the code to expire */
  mailTransporter: { /*the mail transporter object can be customized based on the nodemailer documentation*/
    service: 'gmail',
    auth: {
      user: 'gallexy-emailer@gmail.com',
      pass: '<email-password>' //Keep this secret
    }
  },
  https: true, /* Enables use of secure cookies. */
  appURL: 'localhost:3000', /*relative to the outward facing internet, if using an http port, omit the port. */
  devMode: true /*set if you want the app to not send emails and auto register people when the sign up, good for testing. */
};

3. simply run gulp in the /server folder to start the server and database. * If the DB doesn't work, you could run it using the mongod command, modify the DB URL in the app.js, then run the app using npm start

API

All API calls are put through the API router at \api:

Here are the API actions:

Ping

/api/ping

You can ping the server just to make sure it's still alive. Calling a GET request to /api/ping will return:

{"message": "pong"}

Suggest

/api/suggest/?

This endpoint will take an incomplete string, and provide a list of recommendations based on real words, previous searches, and projects in the database. Making a GET request to /api/suggest/?query=<URL ENCODED DATA> will perform a suggestion search. This may look something like this:

{"results":
   [{"title":"Otter Solidarity Project"},
    {"title":"Tetris-3D"},
    {"title":"Studio Desk Revamp"},
    {"title":"Project Melancholy"},
    {"title":"United Makerspace"},
    {"title":"Hello World"}
  ]
}

Search

/api/search/?

This endpoint is designed to power the most important part of the app. The search API takes a request object with queries, filters, and locally stored IDs to ignore. The data for a GET request to this endpoint looks something like this:

{ query: '',
  filters: [ { projectType: 'any' }, { projectOrder: 'popular' } ],
  quantity: '20',
  ignore: ['1834c875ab788f5e','adb75f7a35a85687','865dacb8a65cf05e'] 
}

The GalleXy search engine tries to fulfill the request:

[{"picURL":"LONG PICTURE URL",
  "title":"Project Title",
  "author":"Project Author",
  "description":"Project Description",
  "status":"Started December 2015",
  "id":"189265",
  "popularity":987,
  "lastChange":"2010-12-03T21:43:23.414Z",
  "projectType":"projx"
  }, ...]

Sources

• Background image (NASA JPL): https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA07136
• Footer alignment: http://matthewjamestaylor.com/blog/keeping-footers-at-the-bottom-of-the-page
• sign in/up format: https://semantic-ui.com/examples/login.html

BUG: WHEN THE USER SELECTS FROM THE DROPDOWN AND IT REDIRECTS, THE QUERY WENT TO THE ORIGINAL USER QUERY NOT THE SELECTION FROM THE DROP DOWN.