A student network which promotes interaction within the student community. This aims to provide social opportunities by encouraging students to engage with each other in a fun and friendly online environment.
The application has been developed and tested to work on Python 3.8 and onwards.
To run the application, you should follow the following steps:
- Clone this GitHub repository.
- Ensure that you're in the root directory:
student-network - Install the required Python libraries:
pip install -r requirements.txt - Install the code as a package on your local machine with the command:
pip install -e . - Run the application with the command:
python -m student_network.app - Navigate to http://127.0.0.1:5000/ in your web browser.
Upon opening the application, you will be greeted with a home page. From here, you can log into your existing account, or you can register a new account. It should be noted that registration will only work with university email addresses, and academics will be sent for manual verification after signing up.
When you log in, you will be redirected to your profile page. This displays information about you, such as your hobbies, interests, your rarest achievements unlocked, and links to your social media profiles. Posts made by you are also displayed on this page.
By default, some details will be filled in for you, such as your profile picture, bio, date of birth, and gender. You can edit all these details by pressing the 'Edit Profile' button.
To search for other members on the Reconnect network, you can navigate to the 'Members' page using the navigation bar on the top. From here, you can search by the username, with the option of searching by a common hobby and/or interest too. Search results will be displayed live with their username and their degree, enabling you to visit the profiles of people and make connections.
Connections may be formed with people, with the option of marking connections as close friends. Whereas connections must be accepted by people, you are able to mark people as close friends without making a request. This also means that a user may be your close friend, but you may not be their close friend; the close friend system is one-way. If you wish to limit interaction with another user, then you can block them. All these options may be accessed by navigating to a user's profile.
You can view a list of your connections and pending connection requests on the Connections page. Users who you have marked as a close friend have an icon of a handshake next to them.
On your feed, you can view all the posts of people who you have connected with. This is sorted in chronological order, with the newest posts appearing at the top. You can also make new posts from this page; these are categorised as a text post, an image post, or a link post.
Achievements may be unlocked by performing tasks on the Reconnect network. You can view these on the Achievements page, which displays your progress with achievements as a percentage, and the achievements you have completed, starting from the most recent. This page also shows you which achievements you are yet to unlock. Hovering over each achievement shows the title of the achievement, description, and number of XP gained by unlocking it. Each of these achievements has its own unique icon. Watch out for hidden achievements which are not displayed until you unlock them; these will reward you with extra XP!
You will level up your profile based on how much XP you have gained. This encourages some healthy competition in the Reconnect network. By interacting more in various parts of the application, you will quickly be able to climb up the leaderboard!
We have also provided you with an easy way to test and share your knowledge on the Quizzes page. From here, you can create a quiz consisting of five multiple-choice questions for others to complete. You can also view and take part in quizzes made from other people.
For testing purposes, we have created a lot of accounts and sample data to make
it easier to demo the product. The users barn354 and ic324, both with
password Password01, have been set up with a full student profile and multiple
posts.
The following dummy accounts have been set up:
student1,student2,student3, andstudent4for student accounts.staffuserandstaffusertwofor staff accounts.adminuserfor an administrator account.
Requirements analysis has been encapsulated through our research documents on potential solutions, design thinking plan, and MoSCoW matrix. They can be found in the following path: docs/requirements-analysis
A promotional poster has been designed for this project. It can be found in the following GitHub repository path: docs/designs/poster.pdf