We Recipe

Detailed Description

“We Recipe” is a small social networking platform designed for cooking enthusiasts to share recipes, dish photos, comments, and interact with one another. The main goal is to build a simple and user-friendly platform that runs reliably on legacy technologies (pure PHP), allowing a deeper understanding of system architecture without relying on modern frameworks.

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📌 System Architecture

• Custom-built MVC architecture

  • Model: Handles MySQL queries and maps results into structured objects.
  • View: Pure HTML and CSS with embedded PHP variables.
  • Controller: Manages requests, validates sessions, calls models, and renders views.

• Manual Routing

  • A single index.php file processes all incoming requests, reads the action parameter, and routes to the appropriate controller.

• Session-based Authentication

  • Login, logout, and user state stored using $_SESSION.
  • Custom middleware to verify user permissions for recipe management pages.

• Media Upload

  • Recipe images uploaded to the /uploads directory.
  • File validation for MIME type and file size.

• Pagination & Search

  • Search recipes by dish name or ingredients.
  • Pagination implemented to improve performance when listing large sets of recipes.

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📌 Technologies Used

• Backend: Pure PHP (no framework)
• Frontend: HTML5, CSS3, Vanilla JavaScript
• Database: MySQL
• Architecture: Custom MVC, manual routing
• Authentication: PHP Session
• Other: File uploads, PDO prepared statements, modular PHP components

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📌 Key Features

• User registration, login, logout (session-based)
• Create recipe posts (title, ingredients, method, image)
• Comment on recipes
• Manage recipes: create, update, delete
• Recipe search by name or ingredients
• User profile pages
• Pagination for recipe listings

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📌 Future Enhancements

• Upgrade to Laravel or Next.js + REST API for a more modern architecture
• Add features such as likes, saved recipes, and user following
• Implement real-time notifications using WebSocket
• Use Redis for caching and reducing load on MySQL
• Switch from session-based auth to JWT or OAuth2
• Integrate a CDN to accelerate image loading
• Add AI features to recommend recipes and classify dish images

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