Torquative begins

So, for the last year or so I've been working on a Car Forum using the forum software Discourse (seriously go check it out, it's an awesome product). Torquative came from a marriage of the words torque (power of a vehicle) and talkative. I'm a real car nut, so combining two of my interests seemed like a good route to go down.

Discourse is built with Ember on the frontend and Rails as a backend, the Rails app serves as an API to the frontend. It's quick, very quick - almost no load time makes flicking from page to page almost instantaneous. The forum as a bare project is still pretty comprehensive, it comes with a full guide on how to install it even down to a comprehensive guide if you're a more experienced individual.

In order to add the functionality I wanted, Discourse comes with the ability to add plugins, so I set out to create one. At first, Ember was foreign and it took a lot of late nights figuring out how it all fit together, but after a few weeks or so I was quickly getting the hang of it. The plugin extends the core functionality of Discourse to add an extra menu item and a couple of extra pages. The first was the 'Garage', this was where users could showcase pictures of their rides to other users. The second was the add vehicle page, this is where users would add details about their vehicle, inputting the make, model, vehicle type and a multiple of images.

What started off as a hobby grew to a side project I was proud of, especially considering I dove head first into Ember. It goes live soon so be on the look out and be sure to add your vehicle!

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