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've been trying to learn CSS. I went through the relevant sections of Colt Steele's Web Bootcamp. It is mostly focused on Bootstrap, which disappointed me a bit. So I went through MDN to learn Flexbox and CSS Grid, which seemed like a better alternative. The fundamentals are easy enough, but when I try to make a layout everything gets mixed in my head (even though I have the documentation open at all times). The impression I get is that modern CSS is not one thing, but a bunch of little things that resemble each other in a confusing way. It's hard to infer stuff and there are gotchas everywhere. I know this is not a programming language, but it is at least programming-related. Learning CSS feels more like learning English than a technology: you must accept that it's not a cohesive system, but rather the culmination of a long historical process full of random developments.

I tried getting back to Bootstrap, but then I have to override a bunch of stuff I don't even know is there.

I'm having a lot of trouble trying to put something very simple together. I just wanna leave that behind and go back to my beloved Python.

I did not want this to be a rant, but it is now a rant. So be it :P

This post has now a soundtrack.