I'm a full stack dev and my current use of JavaScript language is limited to making the best (read trivial) use of jquery for DOM manipulation in my web apps which primarily use PHP or Python (Flask/Django) as backend.

Now, have you watched that popular thriller movie called Inception which is based on a radical sci-fi concept that an idea or thought can be implanted into someone remotely?

Just like that, I often find myself facing this strange idea that JavaScript is supposed to be just a toy running inside the web browser. No idea where exactly this idea came from! Each time I try to learn JS or think of getting deeper with things like npm, react, etc., this idea just pops up and kinda stops me from doing anything!

Is there any way to get rid of this idea somehow?

TLDR:

I need a website that let's signed in users vote on each others photos, and stores that data on who voted for what in a database.

Background

I run a facebook group of about 2,000 members. This group is designed for analog (any non-digital format) photographers to swap high quality artistic prints with each oter. The community was essentially dead and the admin wanted to throw in the towel so I took over. We've made progress, the group growth jumped by over 500% in the first month after I took over.

Right now trading prints doesn't work well. People make a post using the facebook selling format, and those who are interested comment with the image they'd like to trade for. The problem is that the posts get limited visibility due to facebook's algorithms, and stale posts hang around. All of this reduces over all activity, and the majority of posts don't end up in a trade.

My solution is to do a trade event with everyone participating at the same time. Since facebook doesn't lend itself to this I'd like to whip up a quick site for the event. My time is so limited these days I really don't have the capacity to build something from scratch, and the group certainly doesn't have any other developers to help out with it (it skews heavily on the older side).

I'd like to find an open source project that lets users sign in (sign in using facebook would be a bonus) and upload/vote on images. After the voting closes, I'll write code to pair everyone up in a way that optimizes for everyone getting to make a trade. If Alice votes for Bob's image, and Bob votes for Alice's image, they would get paired up to make the swap.

I feel okay writing the code to map out swaps, but I'm pretty terrible at web design and especially at front end design. I've looked across github, but I wanted to reach out and see if anyone could recommend something that I might of missed.

I don't expect to have 2,000 members participate, I think it may be as few as under 100, so hopefully I won't need to worry about scale.

Thanks in advance for the help!

I'm going to be building a simple blog for myself.

Partially I just want something really simple and customizable, and also it will be a fun little programming project.

I'll be using PHP and mySQL for the backend. I won't be using any sort of framework as it shouldn't be necessary for a very simple blog. I'm fairly comfortable with JavaScript.

What I'm imagining is some sort of JavaScript library I can just download, link to my html and then turn a textarea into a simple wysiwyg editor. It could be as simple as a markdown editor or something with a little more features.

It has to be free. Open source would be a plus.

If anyone has any recommendations or advice I would be very grateful. Thanks!

I think I've identified an unfulfilled need in our current online environment, have an idea of an end-result that could flourish, and some possible ways to monetize without being a cancer on society.
I have some experience with basic site-building, but this would be a very ambitious project for one person. It will probably take a long time before I get it going—if I get it going at all. I know some of what I need to start learning to make it work, but my mind doesn't know where to start when it comes to security, stability, or scalability.

Security:
This is probably my biggest concern. We hear all the time about data breaches, and this idea is—at its core—a kind of social media; by its nature we're dealing with PII.
Where does everyone go wrong here, and how do I protect the information of potential users?
All I've got is I know that storing passwords in plaintext is a bad idea, and to encrypt 'stuff' .

Stability:
I'm sure we've all experienced a site going down to a heavy load. Say I can get a site up, and things go well for a bit, and then somebody with a big twitter/instagram/youtube audience says something and a hoard of people come to check it out. A site going down when you try to check it out doesn't leave a positive impression. Can this sort of thing be prepared for, in the possibility such a thing ever happened?

Scalability:
If I can get a workable site running, I don't expect much of a userbase for a while, if ever. But if it does get large enough to attract hundreds of thousands, or a million+ returning users, it would be nice if I could have the architecture in place to handle that ahead of time, instead of playing catch-up later. What makes a site scalable, and is there any reason it can't be prepared for?

I'd love to be able to pay some folk to help me, but I don't have the cash for that. The initial launch will have to be done by me alone, so I'm fully prepared to learn what I need to and take the long amount of time required (maybe next summer?) to get the minimum product going. Even if this ends up not being feasible to get going alone, I figure the worst case scenario is a lot of learning along the way.