ARTELEVATE

Introduction

The Project

Art is the an expression of the human spirit and the many paths man has taken to become what we are today. It is a time capsule for a past, present and future. Without art, how would we ever justify our time here on this big ball called "Earth". Well, I present to you ArtElevate.

ArtElevate is a online art gallery aiming to respond to local, well known artists, collectors, art enthusiasts and the casual user indulging in everything art. Artists can create their profiles, upload their artwork on to the platform, sell their artwork on the platform and also check out works from other artists. Users can register onto the platform, add their favorite artworks to their favorites page, add artwork to cart, view artwork details and artist profiles.

Other features for artists is to delete or edit artwork uploaded onto the platform, removing artwork from the favorites page, adding and removing from cart and updating quantity of an item in the cart.

Use this link to visit my application: ArtElevate

The Context

This project is our Portfolio Project concluding the Foundations at ALX SE Program. We were able to choose what to build and produce a working MVP (Minimum Viable Product) by the end of the two and half week deadline.

The Team

I worked on this project by myself. I am passionate about design and technology. I love to learn new things and this was actually one of the biggest challenges i have undertaken.

• Ruhinda Roderick Izooba - Graduate Architect and Aspiring Software Engineer. LinkedIn

Blog Posts

After the development phase, I wrote a blog post to reflect on the ArtElevate journey.

• Ruhinda's article:

Tech Stack

Architecture

Overview

This web application is coded mainly in python and flask as a web framework. It is a full stack application with back-end to increase functionality and front-end to build the UI and UX of the application. I designed the User Interface using HTML, and Bootstrap 5.

Flask

This project takes the use of flask to a whole other level with use of it's standard library features that is redirect, url_for, request and many others.

I was able to use other flask libraries that is Flask-Login (Login manager) which had amazing features such as login_required, current_user and methods such as is_authenticated and get_id(which used to get the user id) also using amazing tricks to access user details from the database in the back-end with current_user.id/name/whatever_you_wish_to_use.

I was able to use Flask-WTF which is amazing for creating forms that can be used in the front-end which ensures security for the form data and also amazing integration with Jinja.

I was able to utilise the power of Flask-Uploads which assists with image upload, storage and and serving image files. This simplified the workflow and ensured specifically image files were uploaded to the platform. This ensures image file extensions such as jpg, jpeg, png and gif are only added to the platform.

Finally, I was able to use Flask-Migrate which I used to monitor changes made to the database schema and this help me update changes such as adding a column to an existing table or even adding a whole new table. These are the commands used flask db init, flask db migrate -m "Message" and flask db upgrade.

For future features, Use of Flask-Mail with an email service to send emails to artists when an order is made for their works.

Select Screenshots

Home Page

Login and Register

Artist Profile and Upload Artwork page

Favorites

Cart

Checkout

Installation

Fork this repository to your github account to allow you access to the repository. From this you'll get access to the files within the repo and run a git clone on your local machine to gain access directly to files on your local machine. Install python on your local machine through your terminal. You could either download python using this link https://www.python.org/downloads/ or on your terminal using the following:

On Linux/Ubuntu:

• sudo apt update - This updates your package lists
• sudo apt install python3
• python3 --version - This is to verify the installation

On MacOS using HomeBrew

• /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)" - Installation of Homebrew
• brew install python
• python3 --version - This is to verify the installation

On Windows via Powershell

• Follow the link above and download and install python on your machine.
• python3 --version - This is to verify the installation

Usage

• Navigate to the directory ArtElevate.
• Create a virtual environment on you terminal by using this python3 -m venv env.
• Access you can access your virtual environment by using this source env/bin/activate and leave your virtual environment by using this deactivate.
• Run this to install all necessary packages that exist in the requirements.txt file by using this pip install -r requirements.txt.
• Create an environment variable named DATABASE_URI using this command export DATABASE_URI=(your_database_URL/URI)
• You can then run the application using this python3 -m main on the development server or gunicorn main:app on the production server.

Contributing

This is an open source project welcoming all to contribute to this web application.

Author

• Ruhinda Roderick Izooba rickyruhinda@gmail.com

Licence

MIT Licence.