Meet Circcle : The Home For Industry Community.
Create, organize, share useful information and build connection with your audience.
Table of contents
Project Overview
Meet Circcle: Every industry's home for managing and bonding with their audience through communities.
Circcle is an easy to use web application built for every industry to help build a community with stronger bond and faster communication between their users or audience. This awesome project was developed by my friend Harry Udechukwu and I, Harry is an innovative product designer and frontend developer who worked effortlessly to make this project come to live with a good user interface.
Active communities act as a catalyst for every company whose interest for their users or audience is uttermost, so we thought of building something that would accommodate every industry in the ecosystem not just developers or any specific industry.
Inspiration:
Every company has users and audiences who use and follow their product everyday, so the need to foster growth and communication is crucial. Forbes made it clear that "Community breeds collaboration and growth" so I thought about a product that would help breed such qualities in companies
User-Interface Guide
Of course I had a standard for the designs because I was creating something easy to use that would communicate a lot to people. I used the color "blue" which represents sky and the seas associated with open spaces and has a positive effect on mind and body according to supercolor.com. On typography, we used a beautiful geometric sans serif font called "outfit" by outfit.io which makes the entire user interface readable and legible enough for the user. We were inspired by LinkedIn and Hashnode for the user interface.
Tools Used:
Nextjs - Frontend framework
Chakra UI & Tailwind - Styling
Prisma - ORM(Object-Relational Mapping)
PlanetScale - Database
React-hook-form - Form state
SWR - Server cache state
Framer - Landing page
Features:
Handling communities has never been an easy task but our aim is to simplify it while maintaining a user centered interface. Here are some of the interesting features that make it simple and user centric.
1. Community Creation:
One of the core features of circcle we implemented was the ability to allow individuals sign up as community manager and as a user separately. Community managers are allowed to create communities and manage them, they can delete users' posts and edit community information.
2. Create posts or share useful link:
Got any useful information or link you want to share? It can be a link, text or photo, share it. We are working on adding more features like posting videos and hosting events.
3. Post reactions:
What you feel, say, or do in response to something that has happened or something you have experienced is your reaction, so we expect you to react to posts to show how you feel about it.
4. Customizable:
In a scenario where your profile setup was hastily completed, Don't fret 🙂, We got you. You can edit your information to what suits best for you
5. Switch account type:
In Canada you can be charged for switching lanes in an intersection 👀 but we don't charge you here. With just one click, your community manager account can be switched to a normal user account. Cool right?😎
Challenges:
Our main challenge was making it a cross platform web application although we were able to build for desktop view only, we are working hard to make it available for mobile view soon. We faced few other challenges like tight deadlines and some technical issues.
Coming soon:
Even though we had implemented some features, We still had a lot of amazing features yet to be shipped. Features like:
1.Messaging:
Communication is important in every community where messaging serves as a means to send information or connect with others. Bringing it to live would make a good impact.
2.Pinned Posts:
Ever seen important posts but you don't want to lose them yet? The pinned post is right there for you to help you pin an important post right inside your screen.
3.Advanced Manager Controls:
As a manager you are tasked to make your community habitable and safe for others, that alone requires a lot of controls.
4.Mobile version:
One of the major issues we hope to solve by creating a mobile version of the web app for seamless use across all platforms.
Last words:
Our greatest thanks goes to Hashnode and PlanetScale for putting together this hackathon. It inspires creatives to put in more effort. To you my dear reader, thank you for reaching this point. I hope you had a great time reading what I have put together for the open-source community. If you are also driven by this project and want to help bring in new features or make any contribution, Circle is fully open-source so you are highly welcomed.