Week 2: Working on Project Design

A second week has gone by and I am happy to say that I am now better acquainted with the Melange code-base. During the week, I managed to create a clone of the source and have now deployed to my very own GAE instance :).

Update on my bug-fixing progress:
I managed to submit my very first patch for issue 890. I also started looking into issue 884, but as it requires some re-design of existing templates, discussion is ongoing as to how this issue can be resolved.

Update on my Project:
As my project is to appear as a new module in the soc.modules section, I am tentatively naming it as social.

I have started on the design work for the ‘Tabbed User Pages’ which is one of the two main features I have proposed.

Data Models:
I have come up with additional data models to contain information on users which will be displayed on their user pages. The proposed additional models are as follows. These are not finalized as discussion is still ongoing as to the inclusion and exclusion of some of them.

soc.modules.social.models.user_page.py
soc.modules.social.models.education.py
soc.modules.social.models.project_details.py

The user_page.py model will serve as the master model which will contain all the attributes of the user model which will appear on the user profile page. The details of education and past and current GHoP/GSoC projects can have multiple values for a given user and hence are extracted out to separate data models by themselves.

Thus far, I have envisioned the User Pages to have a tabbed view with three tabs, the ‘Profile’, ‘Project’ and ‘My Stuff’ tabs. The ‘Profile’ and ‘Project’ tabs are self-explanatory, the ‘My Stuff’ tab will be used for users to show their personal blog feeds using the RSS widget for now. Should more widgets be developed (i.e. Twitter widget J), they can be added in this tab.

Users will be able to edit the data in their user pages using a single form to edit the data shown in all the tabs, using the 'Edit User Page' link. This link will only be visible if the user is viewing their own user page.

Here is a simple use-case diagram to elaborate on the workflow.

Views:

soc.modules.social.views.models.user_page.py
Since the user_page feature serves more or less the same purpose for all the different user roles in Melange, a single view will be created.

Templates:
soc.templates.modules.social.user_page.view_user_page.html
Since the user pages will be tabbed, the entire page will not reload when users switch between tabs. With the help of JavaScript, this can be achieved with a single template with different html div and id tags defining the data to be displayed in different tabs :).

soc.templates.modules.social.user_page.edit_user_page.html
A different template with the html form will be created for the 'Edit User Page' function which will be used to update the user_page.py data model.

Logic:
soc.modules.social.logic.models.user_page.py
To handle the edit/update of the user data a logic is created which will be used to update the user_page.py data model.

In the coming week:

• Check for updates on resolving Issue 884
  
• Finalize the Design for Feature 1 & Feature 2: Maps + Calendars
• Finalize Project Timeline and list code deliverables for mid-term as well as weekly deliverables
• Decide on the specific APIs and libraries to be used for the project.