GSoC 2009: GHOP - Ninth Week Status Update!

Hello everyone,
A week of fair productivity again. Started out this week with implementing the actions that must be available to all users. The complete GHOPTask workflow has been implemented now. The code is also up and running in my demo instance at http://melange-madhusudancs.appspot.com.

To explain a bit on how it all works, any user irrespective of whether he is registered as a GHOP Student (except Org Admins, Mentors and Program Host) can request to claim the task, if he has not claimed a task before. Once this is done, the task is locked down and no other user can claim it. Also let us say there is a limit of Max 1 task simultaneously as it is with GHOP. So the User cannot request to claim any more tasks. This is true for registered students also. Now a Mentor/OrgAdmin of that org(irrespective of who created or modified that task) can accept/reject the request. The student can also withdraw from the task. If student withdraws or Mentor rejects the task goes to reopened state.

If the student's claim is accepted, an automatic update Appengine task is spawn, so the task state changes to Action Needed if no work is submitted by student, there by extending the deadline by 24 hours. And after this deadline also is passed the task is automatically reopened by another Appengine task which will be spawn by the previous ActionNeeded Task.

However if student wishes to submit his work, he can provide a link to his work in the Submit Work box along with the comment and action. The Mentor either accepts the work by Closing down the task or requests for more work, optionally extending the deadline. The student in this case can again submit his work.

Along with implementing this workflow, I have fixed a few 505s this week and mentor_list field validation on task edit form. Also the approve button doesn't appear for the tasks that have already been approved on the task edit form. I am currently working on subscriptions and sending out notifications to the users subscribed to the task. This will be over by this weekend and I will start working on implementing views for tags based on taggable.