SCSU Food Center Website

A view of our homepage that includes a list of possible items
A view of our about page (work in progress for now)
A view of the user's cart if they added any items
An example of the text message received upon submitting an order
The homepage from the admin side after logging in
Bottom of the admin page allowing for item modifications
An orders list based on what another user submits

What it does

Food insecurity is a rising issue among university students due to rising costs and inflation. A recent university survey revealed that approximately 10 percent of students were food insecure and that 75 percent of that group reported being severely affected, such as skipping meals because they could not afford to eat. The SCSU Food Centre is an active organization in UTSC that offers free quality food access to all students, staff, and faculty in an inclusive, non-judgmental environment so that everyone can get equal access to food and fight food insecurity. Our website is based on the SCSU Food Center's grocery pickup program. The website will enable users to quickly add desired items to their cart and place an order directly to the food center. Instead of waiting in line to browse around isles of food, our website optimizes the process and allows users to order digitally. The stock of items and currently available items will all be listed on the website and can be modified at any time.

How we built it

We built a backend server using python flask which connects to a database and JavaScript to render the data onto the frontend.

Challenges we ran into

Along the way, we encountered many programming issues. For example, we had trouble linking our database to our JavaScript server and went through a series of troubleshooting to solve it. After lots of trial and error, we found the main issue in the database itself as there were commas at the end of every string in the database. Another issue we had was with our functions in the python backend. In a similar way to our database issue, we had trouble linking the functions to our JavaScript file. We researched the issue online and found ways to implement the functions by using fetch and the URL of the python file.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're personally most proud of our database and the ability to modify items within that database. The database contains all our items, the availability, stock, description and a picture that can all be modified from our website without the need to manually change the text file.

What we learned

We learned how to make a functional website using html/css/js that also uses databases and apis to retrieve crucial data for our project. We also made use of a API that we never used before, Twilio, an API that sends text messages to users which is used in our project for sending and confirming orders.