Bookie Wookie
The journey from inception to your bookself
Bookie Wookie is a web app I developed along side (Brycen Dorsay) as a project for our Server Side Web Scripting PHP course.
Our goal for this project was to develop a web app that will enable current, future and alumni students to buy, sell and trade textbooks and post secondary course related materials.
We approached the design to be mobile optomized so that students can sell and barter on the go conveniently.
Technologies used
The primary underlying PHP framework we used to build the main functionality for Bookie Wookie is Laravel, along with BootStrap and jQuery for styling. Secondary functionality such as the search feature was implemented using a mix of PHP and Laravel (for routing) and AWS to generate related books based on search key words with customized links to Amazon.
Features
User autentication
Users can register and login, to register, they need to provide a valid email address.
Post an ad
Users who have registered can post an ad and specify the book they want to sell, along with it’s ISBN, condition and price.
Search for books
Users can search for books they want to purchase by either browsing the Book Exchange or inputing their search terms from the search bar located in the side bar. They do not need to be registed or logged into the site to browse ads. Search results return matches to book titles or subjects as posted by the author.
Reply to ads
Once the user has found an ad, they can reply to the ad by clicking on the reply button where they will be presented with a form to post their contact info, the offer for the book and a message. This message is then e-mailed to the poster. (Note: Email feature is only working on our localhost, we suspect this is because Bookiewookie is not being hosted on a TLD)
Amazon Search Results
When the users perform a search, Bookiewookie also returns suggestions from Amazon to related books. We used AWS to generate a SimpleXML object that contains pertinent info on the book for sale on Amazon.
The SimpleXML object returns a custom URL for the link to the book in Amazon that contains tracking information from Amazon for the product being advertised.