I cloned the Twitter website to practice my Rails and BackboneJS skills. You can see the clone here. I first wrote a simple MVP in Rails and then transferred it over to BackboneJS. I then started adding features straight to BackboneJS. However, a lot of the app is still functional via Rails.
My app allows users to sign up and sign in. Users can also do both through Facebook via the Facebook API. Once users sign in, they can find people to follow by typing into a search bar. The search bar uses the PGSearch gem to find all users who have the search query and all tweets that have the query in the body of the tweet.
Once users are following other users, their feed is populated with the tweets from these other users, as well as their own tweets. More tweets are loaded when the user scrolls to the bottom. I implemented this infinite scroll, using the Kaminari gem and some listeners in BackboneJS.
Users can view other users' profiles to view their tweets, who they're following, and who is following them.
Lastly, when users tweet, they can mention users with the @ symbol and create hashtags with the # symbol. I parse the tweets for these symbols and find the matching users and hashtags in the database. When I display the tweets, I add links to the users' show pages. Users can also see all the tweets that mention them in the notifications tab. On the other hand, when users click on the hashtag links, they actually perform a search for that hashtag, much like how the real Twitter does it.
Todo: Add notifications and retweets