GSoC Week minus 1 | Ajax Demo and UI Redesign discussions

Before we start, let me just remind you that if you know me at all, you would know my craze for AJAX. Naturally, it was obvious that any GSoC proposal of mine would invariably contain a lot of AJAX stuff (Check my proposal here).

The first seven weeks, till the mid term evaluation, my primary work is to AJAXify the certain elements of ATutor. Just to make sure that we were on the same page, Alex, my mentor, asked me to give him a demonstration of the AJAXification.

Considering I got a new laptop just under twenty four hours ago, I was pretty desperate to start the work (since I had not been able to work at the Linux terminal for almost two weeks now, thanks to my laptop woes!)

Since I had previously worked on fixing a bug related to the comment deletion in File Storage of ATutor, I decided that it would be the best place to show the demonstration. Since the afternoon, after struggling with Connectify and other wifi-hotspot related issues (a blog on that later), I have finally completed the basic functionality of comment deletion using AJAX (You can find my working branch here). I use a jQuery fade to remove comments after confirmation. Looks pleasing to my eyes!

Considering ATutor gives utmost importance to accessibility, my next work would be to make use of an accessible dialog box, in place of the alerts and confirms I have used (they can get pretty irritating at times). There is a dialog box which appears on timeout is accessible and I could use that(The link to the JS file which governs this action can be found here, interesting to note that Alex is the author). I am planning to reuse the same code to come up with something for the AJAX messages/confirmations.

Regarding other discussions on my proposal, we have discussed about a few things. Firstly, we plan to convert the present CSS to SASS, which would start just after the AJAXification. We then plan to add dropdown menus and better navigation through breadcrumbs. We have also planned to make from scratch an accessible flipswitch, the work on which has been started and would be put in github soon.

That's about it for now. I guess I am using the "Community Bonding" period pretty well ;)