The rest of this series can be found here.
Day 3: time to start working on a project from scratch without following a guide. I’m intentionally not taking one of numerous online classes for several reasons:
- More freedom to explore
- More work figuring out how to do something rather than just re-typing or copying/pasting from a guide (and hopefully, more learning)
Starting today, I’ll be working on a simple to-do/checklist app; I don’t have as much time today, so probably will just sketch out the basics of the app and not get too deep into code today. Here goes.
Objective
A simple checklist app, allowing you to create one or more items per day that you can “check off.” I’m not sure yet if I’ll build out support for recurring items.
Models
- Dates: I had thought about creating a model for dates and may eventually end up doing that, but figured I’d try using built-in date functions first.
- To-dos: the main model; has a required title, a required boolean “completed” field, an optional (but encouraged) date, optional notes
- Tags: a secondary model; tags will be more flexible than “folders” to put the to-do items into
Routes and Views
- When loaded, the main site will bring up a list of all the uncompleted to-do items
- /completed/ will bring up a list of the completed items
- /create/ will bring up a page for creating a new item
- /tags/ will bring up a screen to manage tags
Other considerations
- Since app this will (eventually) be publicly-accessible, I’ll need to add a few more things:
- Require users to sign up and authenticate themselves to use the service
- Limit the number and size of items (to keep database size down) and/or reset the database periodically
- Eventually, I may add Ajax functionality to streamline the experience.