Solo build · Mar 2024 – 2025
Cassablanca: Online Marketplace
A full-stack online marketplace built from the ground up with Django: user accounts, item listings with images and categories, keyword search with filtering, buyer–seller messaging, and a seller dashboard.
- Python
- Django
- Tailwind CSS
- SQLite
- Pillow
What it does
Cassablanca is a classifieds-style marketplace: users sign up, list items for sale with images, prices, and categories, browse and search what everyone else has listed, and message a seller directly to start a conversation. Sellers get a dashboard to manage their own listings in one place, and each listing surfaces related items from the same category.
It’s a complete transactional product, with accounts, listings, search, and messaging, rather than a single-feature demo.
How it’s built
The interesting decision here was app decomposition. Rather than one sprawling Django app, I split the project into focused ones, each owning a slice of the domain:
core: authentication and landing/contact pages.item: listings, categories, keyword search, and filtering.dashboard: a seller’s view of their own items.conversation: the buyer-seller messaging inbox.
Django 5 handles the application and admin layers, Django templates plus Tailwind CSS give a responsive UI, Pillow handles image uploads, and SQLite handles storage, which is zero-ops persistence that’s more than enough for the dataset size. Secrets stay out of the repo via python-dotenv.
Why it matters
Search and messaging are the two features that separate a marketplace from a list of things. Search means a real query path over listings, with keyword matching across name and description, narrowed by category. Messaging means modeling conversations and inboxes between two users, not just a contact form. Wiring both into a clean multi-app Django structure is the exercise: the boundaries between item, conversation, and dashboard are where the design actually lives.