Week 13 - End of the journey

Its the end of week 13 now and also the time for "Firm Pencils Down" date. 3 months have passed since I commenced work on this project. Its been a long and eventful summer and I got to learn a lot from.


The last week has been quite hectic with a flurry of pull requests to do bug fixes of existing bugs and the bugs which surfaced up recently and also to do changes according to feedback received by mentors. Here is a list of tasks I completed in the last week -


1. Fixed issue #451 - Now the modify page prompts users if they try to leave the page without saving the changes, in all themes. Also it gives the prompt only when the user has made a change.

2. Fixed issue #454 - Fixed the Global Index to show the alphabetical filters to sort the items

3. Finally fixed quicklinks and their tooltips - Fixed the overflowing quicklinks text in the basic theme. Also fixed the quicklink tooltips which now show both wikititle and full url to the item instead of just the wikititle.

4. Added css for smileys in basic theme which was missing earlier - Commit

5. Replaced important hex color values with variables in basic theme's theme.less. We should stick to using variables as much as possible as it makes it easier to understand and use and also make changes quickly - Commit

6. Fixed the invisible links in meta view in basic theme - The itemlinks in the meta section in the basic theme had the same color as the background color and hence became invisible. Changed the color of the links in this patch to fix the issue. - Commit

7. Added capability to edit acl string in item acl report view itself - Commit

8. Fixed the overflow of item names in the index view - Long item names used to break the css and overflow into a second line - Commit

9. Removed full stops from view titles - Commit

10. Fixed erroneous input element css in basic theme - There was unnecessary shortening of input textboxes - Commit

11. Fixed overlapping links in orphan view - The links did not have enough vspace between them. Added css to fix that - Commit

12. Right aligned time column in modernized theme history view - Commit

13. Made default acl string green in item acl report and made submit acl button smaller to make it look neater - Commit

14. Increased font size in global tags view in Modernized theme - The tag cloud in this theme earlier had very tiny font which was very hard to read - Commit

15. Removed extra commas and spaces between links in the meta view in basic theme - Commit

16. Made section heading size uniform across all sections in basic theme - Commit

17. Shifted Login button to the right in modify view in basic theme - Commit

18. Added title to icons in global history view and added padding under date titles - Commit

19. Fixed faulty footer which used to rise to the top at low resolutions in basic theme - Commit

20. Fixed failing modify view - The modify view was not being able to make changes to an item due to not being able to retrieve the Item ID - Commit


Phew!! Finally this has come to an end. It was a whole new experience and a whole new level of exposure to real-time, real-world work. I would like to thank both my mentors - Roger and Thomas for helping me and guiding me throughout the project and more importantly for giving me an opportunity to work on such a big project. Also I would also like to thank PSF and also Google because without them this would not been as good as it was. I hope to keep contributing to open-source projects. Cheers.

Week 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 Work

Ok guess it has been quite long since my last post.

Week 8

Just like week 7 week 8 was also about ACLs. This week I had to work on the Group ACL visualisation. In order to do that I had to first create a view to list all the groups present in the wiki just like the "Userbrowser" view that is already present in the admin section. We discussed the design of the view on the etherpad and we came up with this view -

The Group View

The names of the groups, their member users and groups are mentioned along with the links to the ACL reports for each of the groups. The list is sortable and is by default sorted by the group names and also the names of group members are sorted by default. Her is the commit for that. After this came the making of the Group ACL Report. For each group we decided to show only those items in the ACL reports which specifically mention the Group name in their ACL string. Here is what the view looks like -

The Group ACL Report

It lists the Item names or Item IDs in case of a nameless item. The names/IDs are hyperlinks to the modify view of the items so that the admin can directly go and modify the permissions of the item. Here is the commit for that.

I also worked on and committed the old patches - #445, Userwise ACL Reports, Metadata View in basic theme, Item ACL Report View.

Week 9

In this week I had to work on providing the capability to edit the ACL string for an item in the Item ACL Report so that the admin does not have to go to the modify item view of each item in order to change the ACL rights. So I created an extra text field in the Item ACL Report itself which contains the current ACL string for an item and the admin can modify the ACL there itself. The "default" tag specifies that the string for that item is same as the default ACL in the configuration. The codereview for that is here. Here is what it looks like -

The new Item ACL report with editing functionality

Also this week I had to work on removing the auto-computed metadata from the modify meta view. There was no use in giving them in the edit view as it would either have no effect or would give an error in case the user deliberately tried to change it. Here is the commit.

Week 10 and 11

This week I had improve UI elements and color schemes. Firstly I had to fix a few existing bugs in the UI. The first one was the #394 where there was an ugly mouseover and a validation error in the modernized theme. The namespace shown along with the location line used to show an ugly dropdown menu on mouseover and also it gave a validation error as a span element is nor allowed to contain a ul element. So we did away the showing the namespace over there. Instead we made a "Namespace" section in the "User" view itself. Hence it solved both problems together. Here is the commit for that. Here is how it looks like -

The Namespaces section in User view

Then came the #425 where the basic theme used to give a 404 not found error for common.css in the background as there was no common.css in the basic theme setup. So in order to fix this we decided to keep a uniform naming system for the stylesheets in all the themes. So I changed the names of basic.less to theme.less and basic.css to theme.css in basic theme and main.styl to theme.styl and common.css to theme.css in modernized and foobar themes. Here is the commit for that.

Also in one of the meetings Thomas pointed out that the URL for the User ACL Report is untidy due to unnecessary values being passed in the GET request. I removed those values to make it cleaner. Also he asked me reorder the options in the Admin Menu so that they are properly organised. Here is the commit regarding both of those issues.

Since I had a lot of time left in week 10 I decided to jump ahead and proceed to week 11 work, in week 10 itself. The first thing to do there was to add a background color to the sidebar in the basic theme so that it would look different from the content. So I made up a few samples and we finally decided that shades of blue would be the best choice among all as it would match the theme too. Here is the commit and the screenshot -

The new blue Sidebar

Then the Itemsize view and the Interwiki names view both needed a proper tabular view as they were rather clumsily arranged. Also the item sizes in the Itemsize view were not human readable and were rather the size of the items in bytes. I added bootstrap tables to both the views and also made the item sizes human readable. Here is the commit for them. The old Interwiki and Itemsize views were like -

And the new ones are here -

Also then I added CSS classes for making 2, 3 and 4 column lists. Here is the commit for them. Here is one sample usage -

Old single column list

New multi-column list

Next was to address the issue #66 in sharky93's repo which was about reloading the page when a new theme is selected so that the new theme gets automatically loaded. I added a line fo javascript in common.js -  "location.reload(true)" at the end of the form submission and processing so that current location is reloaded. The "true" argument is to force the page to reload from the server rather than from the cache. Here is the commit for that.

Also I made the Textarea in the modify form to expand/contract as the page is expanded or contracted, similiar to the way it happens in the modernized and foobar themes by making the width of the textarea as 100%. Here is the commit for that.

Last but not the least I removed the subitems sidebar in the modernized theme as it was not working as intended and removing that would have made it consistent with the other themes. Here is the commit for that.

Week 12

In this week I was supposed to add the capability for users to add their own custom css to the themes using wiki items as the source in the "User CSS URL" in the "Appearance" settings. We had planned to use a "raw" view to render the raw css as use that as the source. But Thomas pointed out that this capability would cause potential security threats as the users could make calls to malicious javascript codes using the url tag in the css. So this plan was dropped. So we planned on working on whatever is currently there and to improve it. Also the plan was to find flaws if any in the work done by me till now by practically using the wiki.

So first up this week was to finish open issues in my own repo and to report and solve new findings. The first one was to add CSS to the ACL reports in the foobar and modernized themes. I added the "zebra" class to the tables in both and modified a bit of css in order to make them look better. Here is the commit and the screenshot -

A small fix was to add an h1 header to the global index view in the basic theme to make it consistent with the other views. Here is the commit and screenshot -

A bigger task this week was to improve the global index view in the basic theme as it was poorly organized. I added bootstrap icons and tables to improve the view. Here are the commit and screenshots -

The old Global History view

The new Global History view

I also revisited the overflowing quicklinks problem. I now removed the delete quicklink "X" icon and instead gave the user the same option in the User Actions tab, as suggested by Thomas. Also since the icon is removed I increased the maximum characters in a quicklink to 20 as there was more space. Furthermore the tooltip now shows as "<wikiname> : <full url>". Here is the codereview for the changes. 

The next week would involve finishing the project after finding and fixing whatever bugs I can find. Hope that all goes well :D