It's completion of week 6 and that's officially half way through the Google Summer of Code 2013. Now that I look back, I have been going at a pretty comfortable speed and just ahead of the deliverables mentioned in my application. Having said that, I guess it's time to reflect back on the changes I did in my last week.
This week was marred by new hostel woes, the troubles that I had to face while moving into a new room. However, I did manage to complete a few tasks by the end of the week.
The first priority this week was to make more changes to the a11yAccordeon. First, I worked on improving the search feature I had added to it, which eventually got merged.
Next, I worked on adding color schemes to it, which involved some re-factoring of code in LESS. Finally, that too was merged, but it raised some minor issues which I would handle in the next phase.
With the two dropdown menus I had implemented, there were apparently some issues with accessibility. I got them running on one of IMG's servers to make sure they worked in all environments- from IE to Safari, Windows to Linux Mint.
The next part in improving the navigation system was to remove the sub navigation tabs and replace them with breadcrumbs. We were inspired bu the breadcrumbs in Bleacher Report and implemented a simplified version of the same in ATutor.
To sum up my work in the first half of the GSoC, I started with AJAXificaton of many processes to ensure the community can convert the rest of the application soon with the help of the existing code. Then, I moved on to improve the browse courses page, which involved adding an accordion which was accessible and real time filtering of courses. I moved on to improve the navigation of ATutor, including and not limited to adding dropdown menus. I have improved the help page to make it look a bit modern. I also worked to change the search, first to add a small text box at the top, which was a link to the search page before, replacing it with an 'advanced' link and then improve the look of the search page.
My work in the next half of the GSoC is pretty clear. I have to improve the system preferences page, which has too many options for comfort before you get to the submit button. Next up would be the instructor's manage page, which is basically a sea of links. I have had discussions on these with my mentor and would be taking these up as soon as I perfect some of my code earlier. One more important task is to convert the present CSS to SASS and try to simplify themes in ATutor. Let's hope that I complete these tasks way ahead of time and deliver far more than I had ever imagined while drafting the proposal.
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