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FinForum Signup + Info
Inspiration
The internet as always, is a vast resource we can leverage towards our goals. As students, and as many other people, we face challenging budgeting choices. That's why we wanted to create a platform for people on a budget to create goal-focused budgets, and allow them to share their budgets with others, opening a dialog for constructive criticism and discourse on questions + advice.
What it does
The user can create budgets by filling out fields such as overall goal (tuition, car, house, etc.), expenses, and income streams, then our website will help the user better organize their overall finances to achieve their purchase and general financial well-being. The forum aspect is where the user can interact with other members to discuss aspects of each other’s budgets and share stories and advice. The user may also create an account so that their budgets can be saved online.
How we built it
The front end of our website utilizes ReactJS + Vite+MUI, and Firebase Authentication for handling user login/registration. We planned on using SQLite as a database. We are using Google Cloud as a host for our forum which is running off of the forum tool Phpbb.
Challenges we ran into
On the front end, it was our first time using an authentication tool like Firebase auth. Considering this, it took a significant amount of time to set up the basic login and registration functionality for our application. On top of the authentication was the unfamiliarity with how to use a logged-in status to restrict the React Route paths, and blocking of routes like MyBudgets, and Explore Posts. On the backend, we had similar issues setting up the Phpbb instance, creating our first instance of a cloud-hosted VM, and setting up Mysql/MariaDB, then installing Phpbb.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to complete the majority of the login system and set up our instance of Phpbb, exposing it to external traffic. This was done through many hours of guides, troubleshooting, and struggling.
What we learned
On the frontend, we learned how to work with Firebase Authentication, how the react context api generally works, and how to set up a vm via Google Cloud.
What's next for FinForum
FinForum will need the Frontend to communicate with the Google Cloud vm instance to fetch the hosted forum so users will be able to create posts, we will need to derive a way to associate posts with Budget posts, add a Budget visibility (public/private) feature and ensure the authenticated user's loggedin status persists across pages and when pages are reloaded.
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