Current State of the Project
The GitHub repository is available at https://github.com/ajitsinghkaler/devto-clone, and the live deployment can be accessed via Firebase at https://dev-toclone.firebaseapp.com/.
The homepage was finished during the previous week.
In the current week, work shifted toward the article details page. While styling remains pending, the core structure has been established. The layout mirrors the homepage by splitting into three main areas: the reaction controls, the article content, and the user-related information.
The primary focus this week was on building out the article detail section and connecting it with the homepage article entries. This turned out to be a somewhat demanding task. One particular challenge involved fetching a specific article by its path — it turns out the username in the path can belong to either a user or an organization, and when an organization exists, the organization name takes precedence. Another obstacle was the absence of a dedicated API for the featured article on the homepage; previously, the first article from the general articles API was used, but that approach was flawed because the first result might lack an image. Additionally, that API returned stale content. The solution was to switch to the rising articles endpoint and select the first entry that includes an image. While this consumed a significant portion of yesterday, steady progress was made, which is a positive outcome.
The article section itself is planned in three segments: the detailed article view, the comment area, and a “read next” suggestion block. So far, only the article detail part has been implemented. The data is retrieved using the https://dev.to/api/articles/{username}/{slug} endpoint, following the same store-and-API-service architecture used elsewhere in the project.
There is an update worth noting: Chellapan is now contributing work on the listings section. That part will need a masonry layout, which presents an opportunity to extract reusable directives to simplify such layouts for anyone else. Updates on this work will be shared once it is complete. Here is where things currently stand.
Known Issues
- The article section is rendered again on the details page, which might not be a major concern since each state is distinct, though this is still under consideration.
- Tag styling: the tags and their colors arrive in separate arrays from the API. They must be combined, and the logic should be reusable given that tags appear throughout the interface.
Completed Commits
Work is happening on the article-detail branch.
Community Contributions
As noted, Chellapan is handling the listings section, and their progress is eagerly awaited. Anyone interested in helping out is welcome to choose an open issue from the repository’s issues list.