GSoC 2011 GUI Overhaul: Toggleable List

Hi everyone,

Today I'll talk about toggleable list for regular dashboard. To make you clear, there are two dashboards in Melange, one is regular dashboard and the other one is admin dashboard. The regular dashboard is the page that we see if we clicking the "My Dashboard" link on the left sidebar menu, or if you visit the url at gsoc/dashboard/(host)/(program_name). The admin dashboard is available in the left sidebar menu as "Admin Dashboard" if you have a role as a host. If you're login with account that listed as an administrator of melange instance, you have access to that admin dashboard. Admin dashboard can be visited at gsoc/admin/(host)/(program_name)

Currently, regular dashboard is loading a bunch of list at one time. Each list, or called component in dashboard view, in regular dashboard is fetching a lot of entities from datastore in the background. Each role gets different components. If someone has a role both as a host and a mentor, Carol's case, then she gets much components. Too much component will reduce usability. User needs to scroll hardly if she/he looks for component at the bottom. Fetching all list at one time is inefficient too. I've provided three ideas with mockups to handle this problem, one is with tab, two is with iconic page (the same as admin dashboard that I'll talk in the next post) and the last is with toggleable button. Carol agreed with toggleable button. The reason for toggleable button is user can toggle which list/component she/he wants to show without leaving the dashboard page.

I've provided the patch to melange-soc-dev. The implementation is quite simple. To make a component toggleable we just set toggleable and collapse to True inside the context. The list template will check this variable. If we ignore toggleable and collapse then the list will be requested when loading the page. We can set a component toggleable but doesn't collapse at first load by set the toggleable to True and collapse to False. With this approach, other pages with list, such as accepted_orgs, wouldn't be affected. In the next post I'll talk about admin dashboard that being redesigned right now.