Yard Picker is an app designed to help connect people who are hosting or looking for Garage Sales, Estate Sales, and Auctions. Users can visit the site and browse posted sales. Upon creating a user account, users can post new sales as well as build a list of sales to visit and get an optimized route for their day.
This app is hosted on Heroku and uses Node.js and Express with a MySQL database on the back end. We used the Sequelize ORM for database control, and Handlebars and Semantic UI for the front end. Chai and Mocha were used for functional testing. Some of the NPM packages we utilized include:
- bcrypt - Password Encryption
- express-session - Cookie & Session Management
- express-fileupload - File Uploading
- express-handlebars - HTML Page Templating
- semantic-ui-calendar - Calendar Functions for Semantic UI
The application ended up essentially as designed, although some planned functionality was pushed due to time constraints. As delivered, the app meets our minimum basic requirements for functionality:
- Anonymous users may browse sales and see all sales on a map with a pin for each
- Users may create an account
- Credentialed users can post a new sale, or add posted sales to a list of favorites.
- Sellers can manage their active listings - edit and delete functionality.
- User's saved items can be organized and an optimized travel route generated.
This app has great potential for added functionality in the future. Some things planned for future implementation:
- Social Sharing of Sales
- Users can ask a seller a question, with answers posted with the sale posting.
- Users may opt to be contacted by others who may be looking for a yard sale buddy.
- User to User Messaging
- Search and sort functionality
- Ability to customize route beyond optimized itinerary
- Complete photo upload functionality
The deployed heroku project can be viewed here: https://yard-picker.herokuapp.com/