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🌟 About the Project

Knowledge management usually means juggling a Notion doc for notes, a separate app for file storage, a spreadsheet for tracking what you've learned, and no real way to see how any of it connects. Canopy replaces all of it with one dashboard.

Add a note — a link, an article, a code snippet, whatever — and it's instantly searchable, taggable, and filed into a color-coded collection. The part that makes it more than a notes app: every time you save a note, Canopy automatically finds other notes you own that share a tag or a topic, and links them together on the spot. No manual linking, no graph database, no external API — just SQL, computing the same "connected ideas" feeling Obsidian is known for.

Everything runs on a real backend: PHP sessions for auth, MySQLi prepared statements for every query, and a relationship engine you can read start to finish in one file.

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📸 Screenshots

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✨ Key Features

🔐 Authentication

• Registration with server-side validation
• Secure login (password_hash() / password_verify())
• Forgot / reset password flow with expiring tokens
• First registered user is automatically promoted to admin

🧠 Knowledge Vault

• Notes, links, articles, and code snippets in one unified model
• Rich text editing via Quill.js — headings, lists, code blocks, quotes
• File attachments — PDFs, images, videos (20MB cap, validated server-side)
• Tagging with autocreate-on-write
• Collections — color-coded folders for high-level organization
• Pin important notes to the top

🕸️ Smart Relationships

• Notes are automatically linked based on shared tags and overlapping title keywords — no manual linking required
• Computed entirely in SQL, recalculated on every create/update
• Surfaced on every note page as a "Related Notes" panel, with the reason for the connection shown alongside it

🕸️ Graph View

• Every note and its connections, rendered as an interactive force-directed graph with D3.js
• Drag nodes to rearrange, scroll to zoom, click a node to open that note
• Node size scales with how connected that note is; hovering a node highlights the reason for each connection

🔌 REST API

• Token-based authentication — generate and revoke Bearer tokens from API Access in the app, no shared passwords needed
• Full CRUD on notes (GET/POST/PUT/DELETE /api/notes.php) plus a read-only collections endpoint, all returning JSON
• CORS-enabled, so it's callable from your own scripts, a CLI tool, or a separate frontend entirely

📧 Real Password Reset Email

• Password resets are sent via SMTP through PHPMailer (vendored, no Composer required) when configured in config.php
• Falls back to showing the reset link on-screen when SMTP isn't configured, so local development never gets blocked

🔍 Search

• Full-text search across titles, content, and tags
• Instant filtering by collection and content type

📊 Dashboard

• Live stats — total notes, collections, files stored
• 14-day knowledge growth chart (Chart.js)
• Top tags ranked by usage
• Recent uploads feed

🛠 Admin Panel

• Platform-wide stats — users, notes, storage consumed
• User management — promote, demote, or delete accounts
• Notes-by-type breakdown chart

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🛠️ Technologies Used

Backend & Database

Frontend

Purpose	Tool	Why
Backend logic	PHP 8.x, procedural	Auth, sessions, and queries written by hand — no framework doing it for you
Database	MySQL / MySQLi	Prepared statements throughout; relational modeling for notes, tags, files, and the relationship graph
Rich text editing	Quill.js	Lightweight WYSIWYG editor, loaded via CDN
Dashboard charts	Chart.js	Growth chart, top tags, notes-by-type breakdown
Graph visualization	D3.js	Force-directed graph of note relationships
Transactional email	PHPMailer (vendored, no Composer)	SMTP-based password reset emails
Styling	Custom CSS — Fraunces, Inter, JetBrains Mono	A "knowledge garden" identity in deep botanical green and parchment cream

No Composer, no npm, no build pipeline. Clone it, point Apache at it, done.

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🕸️ How the Smart Relationships Engine Works

This is the feature worth walking an interviewer through. sync_smart_relationships() in includes/functions.php runs after every note create/update and links the note to others owned by the same user using two signals:

1. Shared tags — a JOIN across note_tag finds every other note that shares at least one tag, and records which tags were shared as the human-readable reason.
2. Title keyword overlap — significant words (4+ letters) are extracted from the note's title and matched against other titles with LIKE.

-- simplified shape of the shared-tag query
SELECT DISTINCT n2.id, GROUP_CONCAT(DISTINCT t.name) AS shared
FROM note_tag nt1
JOIN note_tag nt2 ON nt1.tag_id = nt2.tag_id AND nt2.note_id != nt1.note_id
JOIN notes n2 ON n2.id = nt2.note_id
JOIN tags t  ON t.id = nt1.tag_id
WHERE nt1.note_id = ? AND n2.user_id = ?
GROUP BY n2.id;

Results are stored in a dedicated note_relationships table and rendered as a "Related Notes" panel, and as a full interactive graph on the Graph View page — giving the Notion/Obsidian-style graph-linking experience without an external embeddings API.

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🔒 Security

• Prepared statements everywhere — zero raw string concatenation of user input into SQL
• Password hashing via password_hash() / password_verify()
• CSRF tokens validated on every state-changing POST request
• Per-user data scoping — every query filters by user_id, enforced server-side, not just hidden in the UI
• Upload hardening — uploads/.htaccess disables PHP execution inside the uploads directory, so a disguised .php upload can't run
• API tokens — REST API access is scoped to bearer tokens that can be generated and revoked independently of the account password

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🗺️ Roadmap

• Auth — register, login, forgot/reset password
• Knowledge Vault — notes, links, articles, code snippets
• File uploads with type/size validation
• Smart Relationships engine
• Collections, tags, full-text search
• Dashboard with live analytics
• Admin panel with user management
• Force-directed graph visualization of note relationships (D3.js)
• Real transactional email for password resets (PHPMailer + SMTP)
• REST API layer with token-based auth, for third-party integrations

Contributions and forks are welcome — open an issue if you'd like to pick one of these up.

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🧪 Testing

Every flow in this repo — registration, login, note CRUD, tag-based smart relationships, graph view, file upload/download, cascading delete, search, collections, REST API endpoints, and the admin panel — has been manually exercised end-to-end against a real MySQL instance to confirm there are no runtime errors.

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👩‍💻 Developer

Ayesha Amjad — Full-Stack Developer (Front-End Focused) & Digital Marketing Specialist

📧 ayeshaamjad819@gmail.com 🔗 github.com/AyeshaCodes25

If Canopy was useful or interesting to you, consider giving the repo a ⭐ — it helps other people find it too.