This week in coding

[elz]

I've been doing mostly small stuff lately - fixed a chapter visibility bug and a bug with the cancel button on the chapter posting page, made it possible to get rid of an OpenID and added a better message to indicate that you need to have an account to log in with OpenID. (Note to self: ask about whether you should be able to leave comments with an OpenID at the next meeting.)

I've also been trying to teach myself Cucumber and Webrat, which are tools for writing internal tests. Testing with Rails can be kind of frustrating, because there are so many different options, and so many of them are fairly new, and because a different gem seems to be the hot new thing every month or so, it's hard to find a lot of documentation online, so you just wind up having to learn things by trial and error. It's even more fun when you have a whole committee full of coders who have varying levels of free time available to learn these things - Sidra wrote about 90% of our current tests, and I feel like I'm still kind of a beginner at it. Ideally, everyone who's writing code should also be writing tests, but it's just hard to manage. Right now, we're using a mixture of Shoulda and Test::Unit with some fixture replacement plugins. Cucumber lets you write tests in plainer English, but to do that, you have to back it up with umpteen-million regular-expression-type definitions that translate your English into Ruby. I'm not yet convinced that this is actually more efficient in the long run, but I wrote some tests for creating a user, logging in, posting a work, etc., and I did a little dance when I got them to pass.

Things I volunteered to do for next weekend:

1) Fix the filters. I've been itching to help out with that, since it makes me sad that you can't separate the SG-1 stories from the SGA stories on the archive right now. Getting all the stories tagged "Stargate SG-1" - that's easy. But we have a system of synonyms built into tags, so that filtering for "Stargate SG-1" should also get you stories tagged with "Stargate: SG-1" and "Stargate SG1", and that's where things get hairy.

2) Do some mock-ups of better chapter navigation options for multi-chapter stories - we're weighing the pros and cons of drop-down menus vs. an index of links.

3) Add javascript character-counters to various form fields so that you know when you're approaching the limit.

4) Help out with some of the planning Amelia is doing for admin announcements.

Meanwhile back at the ranch:

I'm in awe of our coder training subcommittee - they've been doing a ton of work on updating all the documentation and setting up a training project for new volunteers. The archive code isn't exactly easy to dive into at this point, so this is all very necessary. Also: colocation! \o/ There are actual quotes and proposals at this point, so it's become just a matter of all the committees going over everything thoroughly, and it should start to be a reality. That's one of the things that would really get us moving on to open beta. And you should also start seeing more archive-specific updates/Q&As on the OTW blog/otw_news - they're already being written up and planned out.

Look for the next update to the archive some time around the end of the month, and you can leave collection and challenge feedback until then too.