Newsfeed Status Update

Working on the news_feed feature has required work in all the different sections of the codebase (Model, logic, caching, view, template) and has required updates to about a dozen existing modules. As you can imagine, merging upstream is a fun exercise in getting aquainted with some of the more advanced features of version control.

The mechanics behind the news feed are very simple, at least to start with. Whenever an entity - a document, for instance - is created, updated, or deleted, it gathers a list of receivers. The implementation right now is limited to the scope of linkable models, but luckily that covers almost all of the use-cases where we'd want the news feed to be updated.

A new FeedItem entity is created for each receiver - since the receiver in the current implementation is the scope, the receiver is only one entity, but I'm working on a method to propagate news feed updates like an event bubbling up through a hierarchy.


A news feed is constructed for the receiver entities - such as Program, Organization, Club, etc. - and aggressively cached. The template for the news feed itself is very similar to how blogs are formatted in Melange.

One part of the template has been a big headache - the link redirecting to the sender entity.

Right now, this is what the link HTML template looks like -

href="/{{ item.sender.kind.lower }}/show/{{ item.sender.key.name }}"

Yes, it's hacky. But it works...most of the time. When the sender's kind name is "Document", then this translates to /document/, which is what we want. But when the sender's kind name is "StudentProject", this is rendered as /studentproject/, while it should be /student_project/. I'm still figuring out how to properly linkify an arbitrary entity...and I tried using the redirect views helper, but I was hoping to do something that wouldn't require any additional server-side code.

The next week has a lot of challenging tasks ahead. Now that the basic implementation is working, I'm going to work on automation and testing. I'm also going to code up an ATOM feed that can be used to export news feed updates. (This shouldn't be a security issue, since news feed updates only include very basic information and a link to the entity for further information)

Surveys also need to have their ACL component finished so they can be taken for midterms...I've struggled with this when attempting it before, but GSOC needs this feature working, so I'm going to have to figure out a way to do it.

Finally, I've also updated logic for surveys and documents so that based on the prefix of the document, it creates a scope property. This way, the scope doesn't have to be retrieved at runtime and the document model is more in sync with the rest of Linkable entities.