Fwd: Post mid-term Timeline for GSoC: Expanded Q & A Project

[Ananyo Maiti]

On Tuesday, June 28, 2016 at 10:36:09 PM UTC+5:30, Ananyo Maiti wrote:

Hi everyone,

First of all thanks to everyone in the community and all GSoC mentors for your continued support on the project. It's been great to work with you all. Feeling happy on passing the mid-term evaluations and Special thanks to Jeff for your good remarks on my work. It really keeps me motivated for my further work.

Here is my modified Timeline for the post mid-term period for the Expanded Q & A Project

Phase 3 - Create email notification system for Q & A system (29^th June – 11^th July)

• Create system for marking answers as accepted

• Creating friendly urls with friendly_id gem which changes with the node title

• Create email notification system for questions and answers

• Write tests for relevant changes

Phase 4 – Modified views and authorizing resources(12^th July – 1^st August)

• Create distinct Sidebar for question show page and recently answered view in question index page as mentioned in Issue #554(comment)

• Create questions asked and answered questions tab in user profile page

• Introduce authorization to drupal_node, answer models using cancancan gem

• Write authorizatization tests and tests for relevant changes

Phase 5 – Sorting system for questions based on tags (2^nd August – 15^th August)

• Develop a Sorting functionaliy of questions based on tags

• Create a better Streak function and create corresponding views. Need feedback from the community on this.

Final Submission Period (16^th August – 24^th August)

I will use this time for writing final documentation and checking that all tests pass or any

Bug fixes in the code and submitting final evaluations. Also I will put the links for the Q & A pages in various areas of the website. This includes Ask question link in question tags page , Ask question link in dashboard , Question links in dashboard , Question page link in navbar

Apart from that I also intend to write tests for JavaScript based functionalities using jasmine and work to develop a good testing suite for plots2 codebase.

I wish to update these changes on my GSoC proposal at https://publiclab.org/notes/ananyo2012/03-25-2016/expanded-q-a-system-for-publiclab-org so that it will be easier to keep track of my work as well as my evaluations for my final evaluations. So it would be great if this is approved. Then I will make the necessary changes on my proposal.

Please do give your feedback on this and also any points that I should include or add to my timeline.

Thanks and regards,

Ananyo

[Liz Barry]

Hi Ananyo, 

Thanks for this! Looking forward to reviewing with Jeff when he's back on Tuesday. 

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[Jeffrey Warren]

Wow, this looks great, thanks for the update, Ananyo. 

Just curious, can you elaborate on the "authorization" feature? 

One more thing is that we might be able to find time to work together on the new rich editor, adapting it for use in the Q&A system. Would you have time in your schedule for that? If so, we could work through possible plans for that as well. https://github.com/publiclab/PublicLab.Editor

Jeff

[Jeffrey Warren]

Also, Ananyo, as I was answering some questions (in the legacy system) today I thought it might be a good idea to begin drafting a post to explain the new system, what makes it different, and to answer questions like what happens to questions asked in the old system. This doesn't have to be very complete but I find that it's easier to take good notes now, because remembering everything that changed is harder after time has gone by!

J

[Ananyo Maiti]

The authorization feature is basically restricting access to resources a per roles. Like the edit and delete actions for notes can only be accesses by admins, moderators or the user who posted it. Besides authentication so that the links only appears to the specified roles there should be authorization so that the action can't be triggered directly from the url.

I noticed that there is already some manual authorizations done on each actions so we might not need to use the cancancan gem. The gem facilitates the creation of an authorization system. I will check if there is any requirement of this and if not I will ensure that there is  no flaws in the present way of authorization and that proper messages and redirect is present for unauthorized access.

Yes sure Jeff I think I can put the works on Rich editor in the Phase 4 of my timeline as the work on authorization seems to the shortened.

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[Jeffrey Warren]

Cancancan looks really nice though, and seems simpler and more powerful than the cobbled-together system we use now. Let's see how we do on time, as it could be a good thing to swap in for all authorization site-wide, though Rich Editor integration is also exciting. 

[Ananyo Maiti]

I will try to mange both in the scheduled time. Is it ok if I update it on my proposal in the draft response? Just to make it easier to follow.

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[Jeffrey Warren]

Of course! And we can adjust our planning accordingly as the project progresses if we run out of time.

[Bryan]

Re: cancancan, I don't know if it is a true RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), but we have two open tickets about fixing up our permissions system:

https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/268

https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/264

I think Jeff was addressing this with respect to project progress, but I think we want to keep our project scopes fairly limited. If permissions is blocking a feature, we should discuss that. It looks like authorization is part of phase 4 without anything in phase 5 obviously needing it.

I'd love to see some permissions cleanup, or a total overhaul, but I think that would truly be a lot of work. Perhaps not a full GSoC project worth of work by itself, but given everything else on the revised timeline, I don't think a full implementation of cancancan to replace existing permissions with adequate testing would be possible in the time frame.

-Bryan

[Ananyo Maiti]

Listening to Bryan's advice and as I found out too, implementing authorization for plots2 will take more time and will perhaps drift away from the project mainstream. So it will be better if I would keep my works focused on the Q & A Project. Also it will give me time to work on adapting the Rich Editor with the Q & A system. 

So I will  replace the authorization part in my schedule with Work on Rich editor for adapting it with Q & A system and update my proposal. 

Though I am truly interested to work on the authorization system. I can perhaps work on it after GSoC and keep a look on those issues Bryan pointed put.

Thanks everyone for all your good advices and feedback!

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[Jeffrey Warren]

Sounds great; thanks, Ananyo!

[Ananyo Maiti]

I have updated my timeline to include the tasks based on all the feedback. Please have a look. https://publiclab.org/notes/ananyo2012/03-25-2016/expanded-q-a-system-for-publiclab-org#Timeline/milestones 

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[Jeffrey Warren]

This looks great, and thanks for such clear and attentive planning!