Theme Versioning- Week 11

Progress Made

UI Overhaul
This week I overhauled the UI to use a sliding pane that displaces the normal theme-editor interface.
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In addition, I implemented the advanced mode UI and the various ajax functions to support it. Users can now select from either the basic mode which automatically commits upon saving a theme file, or the advanced mode which allows users to control when they commit.

I also created a separate settings page for the theme versioning plugin in which the user can select from the installed VCS Adapters as well as choose to use either the basic or advanced mode UI.

Mentor Recommendations
I fixed various usability, performance, and best-practice issues brought to my attention by one of my mentors, Dominik (ocean90)
the fixes included:

• Enqueuing the UI javascript in the footer instead of the header for performance reasons
• Displaying more information including author name and timestamp in the revision viewer
• Renaming the javascript file to something more descriptive
• Got rid of a few bits of code that were no longer used in this version
• Use empty() instead of sizeof()==0

Clean Up and Refactoring
I spent a little time cleaning up some code and refactoring. There is still some more work to be done on this front. My philosophy is make it work, even if it’s ugly, then iterate to beautiful, elegant code.

Midterm Release

I tagged version 0.3, the midterm release which includes the new UI (with both basic and advanced modes), the default VCS and the VCS Adapter Interface.

It is available for download here

Below are a few screenshots from the midterm release:

Theme Editor Basic Mode UI

Revision Viewer: Full Screen Shot

Advanced Mode Theme Editor UI

Settings Page

My initial workflow proposal is mainly finished The…

My initial workflow proposal is mainly finished. The only thing that left is the diploma/certificate functionality, the decision for, I hope we will take tomorrow. Initially I proposed to generate pdf, which is wrong if placed in the context of 1.000k userbase (the server load, and resource consumption, will be waisted with no big reason). So, right now I have done all the backend support, what left is how we are going to serve the user course coverage information.

Also this week:

• lots of UI improvements to fit into the .org UI/UX
• rewrote part of the validations system for quizzes (md5 over sanitize_title()), you can ask me in the comments about this if you are interested about how to design a form-builder and a validation tool for it 😛
• added progress indicator, based on number of quizzes taken/submitted responses
• added an interesting bookmarking tool, now you can always bookmark the lecture you left at, and pick it up anytime later directly from your dashboard
• Courseware has uploads integrated into most of its components (so far 6), an in-depth check of how uploads work in WordPress can scare any teacher/user that cares about his submitted files or anybody else who needs flexibility about allowed file types or wants to disable/enable uploads. So I wrote a simple tool to deal with all that stuff, called uploads. Used with Courseware, we can hide/mask download file location, disable downloads or simply add new allowed file types. To solve the problem with a portable encrypting algorithm, I used an interesting combination of basic base64 decoder/encoder along with NONCE_KEY value, worth checking line 164.

Tomorrow around 19:30 UTC, my team is getting together on IRC (#wordpress-gsoc) to talk about current and additional learn.wordpress.org specifications. People that would like to ask/leave some feedback, can jump in and ping us.

Thanks. And good luck everyone this midterm.