GSoC 2009: GHOP - Sixth Week Status update!

Hi everyone,
Another productive week came to an end! As said in the previous week report, I started out this week by completing Bulk Approve and Publishing of tasks for Org Admins, which took over a day for making changes to the way Mentors list of db.Key items being rendered and displayed. This is already available in my demo instance at [0]

After completing it, I started working on Taggable-mixin. Taggable mixin's current architecture supports only 1 tag per Appengine datastore entity. But GHOP tasks require 2 tags per entity, one for difficulty and another for task type. So did some research on how to extend it. Finally, based on some suggestions from the developer of Taggable-mixin, Adam Crossland and Lennie, I wrote property wrappers for creating any number N, tags in the model. Have made all the necessary changes to the extended Taggable-mixin class. The core tagging framework now works as required, but still some code cleanup is needed. Along with that a cool UI for adding, deleting and editing tags must be implemented. Also the extended framework needs to be integrated with the Melange code base.

After this, I started working on Students side of tasks. Till now the UI to view and claim the task is ready. Students can also claim the task. The restriction to claim max number of simultaneous tasks as allowed in the program configuration is also done. Other minor details like storing student reference if already signed up and storing user reference are all done. Few things left out are, task header displaying if the task is already claimed or closed and enforcing a student to sign up before he claims the next task after completing at least one. I will be implementing them this week. Expect the demo instance to be up and running with whatever I have promised in a day or 2.

This week, I will be mostly concentrating on completing the student side of tasks and will be moving on to commenting infrastructure for tasks. I may also spend some time integrating Tags with Melange code base and student datastore entities conversion to support high school level students using Task APIs if everything goes well.

[0] - http://melange-madhusudancs.appspot.com/