GSoC Update - Week 1 Work

Just a week to go before the coding period started and I, out of nowhere, contracted typhoid and got hospitalized for 8 days. Luckily not much damage was done and just a couple of days into the week, I was discharged from the hospital. I had already informed my mentor Roger Haase about the delay in work and he was understanding enough to give me more time to start work and asked me to buck up for work ahead. Finally I looked at the plan for the week and started work.

The first issue in light was the issue #73. The sidebar was becoming too large in the Basic theme. The reason being the padding in the cells - the Home button, History, Index, User Actions, etc was 10px, which is quite high. It seemed as though one could fit the text three times in the same button :) . After reducing the padding the sidebar got smaller and looked better fitted. Another thing I did was to make the User Actions, View Options and Item Actions menu expandable. This made the sidebar much smaller and cleaner. The user can click on the '+' button to expand or collapse the menu. Here you can see the code review and commit.

A screenshot of the changed sidebar

The second issue pointed out to me was that the word settings was getting repeated too many times in the 'User Settings' menu in the menu bar. This caused problems in translated versions as for example in German the word 'Settings' translates to 'Einstellungen' which is quite long. As a result the menu bar breaks down and turns multiline. So I removed unnecessary repetition. Here you can find the code review and pull request.

Finally the main issue in focus - The Quicklinks in the Basic Theme. The quicklinks as I had mentioned in an earlier blog were exceeding their divs and as a result the remove button 'X' was also not working. I had also mentioned that it was being caused due to the quicklinks being only shortened to the default size of 25 characters whereas for divs in the Basic theme the ideal maximum size of a quicklink would be 15 characters. So I changed the code in the function call to the shortening function - "shorten_item_name" and passed in 15 as argument. Now another problem that was there was that the quicklink tooltip, which comes up on a mouseover, only showed the current wikiname and nothing about the item itself. So if I have a wiki named "MyMoinmoin", all quicklink's tooltips showed "MyMoinmoin" on a mouseover. We had a discussion regarding the solution to this in the weekly meeting on Saturday. We came to the conclusion that the format "<wikiname> : <itemname>" would be good enough as of now. So I changed the layout.html for basic and modernized themes to reflect the same. It is currently up for review. Here is how it looks like now.