[Systers-dev] Time for weekly updates

[Yian Shang]

Hey everyone!

Another update from me too:
http://movicont.nfshost.com/blog/mailman-archives-ui-added-automatically-detecting-quotes-support

I've been playing with a large number of things, though my biggest change to
the code over the past week was probably adding automatic quote-detecting.
Basically, it's similar to how Gmail highlights quoted message-parts purple
and hides quoted sections at the end of the message. The use case it was
trying to handle<http://systers.org/systers-dev/doku.php/timeline-yian:handling_quoted_parts_in_messages>
was
related to the problems and confusion people had with long quoted messages
at the end of a message, or top/bottom/middle posting in general.

To do this, I created a map of all previous lines in all messages in the
conversation and then checked against the map before marking lines as quoted
or not. I also force-marked lines that began with '>'. Afterwards, these
were consolidated into the largest consecutive quoted segments with span
tags around them that allowed for JS manipulations.

Because this process was actually pretty complicated (it's easy to miss
small edge cases), I had to create a test mbox file that would handle as
many possibilities as it could. I wrote out a list of
specs<http://systers.org/systers-dev/doku.php/testing_of_quoted_messages>
and
here's the mbox file that was being used for
testing<http://movicont.nfshost.com/try.mbox>
.

Finally, the end result was a conversations page that looked like this:
http://movicont.nfshost.com/June-2010/leaving.html

--

I fumbled through my use cases again, and reorganized them into a little
table <http://systers.org/systers-dev/doku.php/timeline-yian:use_cases> I
now like better (read: have some control over). It also allows me to give
short update notices through the use of color-transmorphications on each use
case.

--

I also made some changes to the conversations index UI--it now displays the
number of messages and links to the last message of the thread. I've
described all the use cases addressed in
detail<http://systers.org/systers-dev/doku.php/timeline-yian:users_viewing_index_of_conversations>.
And for convenience, here are the ones about no. of messages and linking to
the last message, quoted:

Users will likely use the data for each conversation to determine whether or
not to click through to the actual messages.

...Number of MessagesOn the same vein, if the user wants answers to a
question s/he may want to check the number of messages in the thread first.
If there's only 1 message in the thread, the question likely hasn't been
answered yet and thus clicking through is not so useful.Recent ActivityThe
user may also have seen a good chunk of the messages in a conversation
before (perhaps they were inactive during a vacation period) and are only
interested in catching up on the more recent activity in the thread. Thus,
giving a link to the last message may be useful.

--

Due to the Javascript and CSS that was being repeated across multiple files
(it's difficult to tell how much you would save by when working with
relatively small mbox files), I moved both into external files and modified
the templates to link to them.

This actually turned out to be harder than I expected, since I had to modify
some helper functions to create the CSS and JS files during archives
generation. This almost feels like a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
situation, but I feel like the modifications to the archive have upped the
ante in terms of using repeated CSS and JS.

--

I also fixed some of the integration issues with the current archives
generation--i.e., I made 'conversations' appear as one of the sorts, and
handled linking to them smoothly. I'd been so caught up in just getting the
conversations index/displays to *work* that I hadn't thought about actually
handling the linking correctly.

I've also created a (highly volatile and very) experimental branch on the
systers dev code<https://code.launchpad.net/~systers-dev/systers/archive-ui>
.
--
Yian

On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 2:34 AM, Anna Granudd <anna.granudd at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
> since it's Friday I guess it's time for another weekly update.
>
> As for my work, I finished my unit tests for the models and started on
> writing views. So far I implemented the possibility to unsubscribe from a
> list. Florian, my mentor, already implemented the possibility to subscribe,
> create lists and list all created lists. I modified his old subscribe
> view/function and added the unsubscribe possibility. However after that the
> problems started. I wanted to continue creating views but for that I need a
> rest-client providing me with the functions necessary to connect to core
> Mailman. The client doesn't have that many functions yet so I started
> checking what functions the rest server had to see if we could further
> extend the client. I then realized that the server also lacks some
> functions
> so I talked to Florian about this and we agreed I should try to figure out
> what we need and file that as bugs tagged so Barry would notice them and he
> and other core people can implement them. For instance, one quite important
> thing missing is the handling of passwords - you can currently subscribe
> and
> unsubscribe (only) without a password and if I am to create a user settings
> page I do want the user to have to provide a password. For other bugs I
> noticed in the client I only sent notifications about them in emails with
> suggested fixes to Florian who wrote the client (possibly with some help
> from his colleagues at work). For now I'll continue trying to find out what
> functions we need and probably start considering how to design the settings
> page.
>
> Thanks,
> Anna
>
>
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