A nano-forum in Rust
I wanted some practice writing "real" "production-grade" "software", so I took on the project of writing something that would have authentication, database access, and decent UX, all in Rust and plain HTML/CSS.
Notably, all the CSS in the project is either in a <style> tag or directly on elements, and no page loads anything except itself. The project is also entirely no-JS.
Architecture
The database schema is simple. There are 4 tables, users, profiles, threads, and posts. users is for the most basic authentication information, and contains the [argon2] hash of the user's password.
profiles contains the extra profile information, like bio and a cool little thing I call "custom color," which lets you set a background color for you user badge.
threads and posts are closely related. The idea is that posts are contained in threads, both of which can be created by users.
Future work
- Currently, every time the database is accessed, a connection is opened and closed. That is not ideal, and implementing a database connection layer would be very useful.
- There are no administrative tools, which makes this software not practical at all to use for any real-world public environment. However, an admin field exists on
users. - Fun tools, like formatted text, image uploads, polls, subforums, would be nice.
- Support for databases that aren't SQLite would be cool!