The website foodsharing.de offers the biggest functioning platform for foodsavers to organize their pick-ups, manage their cooperations and interact with each other. It has a lot of features and is used by over 20.000 German-speaking foodsavers (as of January 2017).
This page is to describe the website, its functionalities and problems. It was written in preparation of the Berlin Hackathon in October 2016, where people started actively working on the code of foodsharing.de again, so it is mainly directed at software developers, but still readable for everyone!
Contents:
Follow the development progress on our blog. Join our development group on Gitlab. |
foodsharing.de is an internet platform to coordinate foodsaving communities to collect leftover food at cooperating businesses (supermarkets, bakeries, markets, ...). It includes roughly the following functionality
The platform is written in PHP5, MySQL, JavaScript and CSS using no frameworks and some parts of different libraries. It runs on nginx and uses a nodejs helper for realtime messaging via websockets. The frontend is mostly served directly via a view/presentation layer but also loads different content - rendered html as well as json - via XHR.
The foodsharing website was developed by Raphael Wintrich from 2012-2014 while it went online early. It got extended mostly on the live system without many administrative tools, no tests, schema migrations, proper deployment system. From 2014 until now, it has been mostly abandoned. While Raphael is still reachable when needed, Matthias Larisch took over the lead development for 2015 and 2016, mostly providing some backend bugfixes or very small features.
2015, it was planned that the envisioned yunity platform can replace the foodsharing platform in 2016. This goal changed, there will not be such a yunity platform according to current plannings. Mid 2016, Raphael Fellmer started sharecy.org as a second approach to provide the foodsharing community with a new platform - as well as reach some further goals. Their roadmap includes providing a platform at the end of May 2017. We - the yunity community - question this date.
I - Matthias Larisch - expect the current foodsharing platform to be used until at least H1/2018 when not even longer, when data migration etc. all is taken into account. This is why I really appreciate the current effort put in to the platform by yunity developers, existing foodsharing contributors, and you, hackathon participant.
The current code works and is used by a lot of people. However, we would love to be able to fix some long existing problems and enable further feature development.
The code is on gitlab. Create an Account, navigate to https://gitlab.com/foodsharing-dev/ and request access. You will get approved soon by Nick, Matthias or Tilmann.
It is very easy to checkout and run a local copy. See the provided Readme in the repository, it is accurate