Release Notes (Alloy)

15 Jan 2017

A continuation of my group project Alloy from ICS 314. My group and I created Alloy during the Fall semester of 2016 with the hopes of making a website that can initiate and strengthen collaboration for projects that needed team members, a way to get a person’s project exposure. At the moment Alloy is bound to the University of Hawaii: Manoa student/faculty bodies.

Original Features
January 15 Update
February 1 Update
February 15 Update
March 1 Update
March 15 Update
April 1 Update
April 15 Update
May 1 Update

Current features of Alloy are the following:

Login information is the username and password associated with a persons UH Manoa login
Users are able to create projects, which are public to other users to view
A search function is available for projects and users, which searches based on skills wanted for projects or skills users currently entered into their personal user information
Users can view individual project profile pages from the search results page
From project profile pages a user can request to join a project if they are not a member or if they are a project admin, they can send invitations to other users
When a request to join is sent to one of their projects a notification is sent to the other of the project
When a user sends an invitation to join a project to another user a notification is sent to the recipient of the invitation
User's hompeage includes a feed of notifications showing request or invitations
User's homepage includes a feed of suggested projects which are related to skills a user has entered into their user information, this is possible through a skill-graph function in Alloy which relates certain skills that are added to an individual project, the more times two skills are added to the same project the stronger the relation between the two will become

January 15: Features/Enhancements

Last semester many of the user feedback were in regards to the Search function/capabilities of Alloy. A few of the search function remarks I hope to correct in this initial milestone are the following: users shouldn’t have to press “clear” to see new search results with a new query; clean up the search pages .html and .js files of unnecessary code; and having the Search pages only available to users who are logged in.

Reactivity: The clear button on both the user search and project search pages have been removed. With the addition of the dep(dependancy) variable in the js files for both searches all search results are now cleared whenever new search tags are queried. The dep variable is given a value when a query is made and if that dep variable is changed in any way all search results are cleared and a whatever changes that are made to the dep variable are displayed.
Clean-up: I went through all the .html and .js files regarding the search function and search results pages to clean up unnecessary lines of code. I removed many lines of commented out code that printed to the console for testing purposes while I was first creating the search tool.
Privacy: The solution to this issue was easily solved. I knew that the other pages on Alloy already worked where a user had to be logged in to see any of the web page so I merely read through their code and took what I needed. The solution had been to wrap all the code within the template tag with a "spacebars" if currentUser statement. Now anyone who wants to see and use the search functions of Alloy must have a login and be logged in to view or use the search capability.

(PLANNED) February 1: Features/Enhancements

One issue from the user feedback last semester regarding the Search function had been to have the search users and projects on one page instead of buttons that changed the page regarding which query you are searching. I plan to consolidate all Search related files into a single .html and .js file. At the moment there are multiple .html and .js files that make up the Search function. I would like to cut that down a lot and clean up the overall organization of this capability. I still plan to keep all the reactivity that the search users or projects currently have. I can see multiple issues popping up when I start working on the consolidation. For example, I will need to create a new UI for the single page search feature.

February 1: Features/Enhancements

The major goal I had planned for this enhancement was in regards to fixing/updating the search page. Prior to this milestone the Alloy search page was comprised of three seperate pages. Originally the main Search page’s UI consisted of two buttons, one button for project searches and another for user searches. Alloy users would click either button and then they would be redirected to a new page dependant on which button they chose. The user and project searches each had their own web pages which had a search bar and each page populated their own query results on the same page reactively. I found having multiple pages for the search a waste and so did the test users at the end of ICS 314.

Consolidation: I created a new Search page that consolidated the multiple pages that comprised the old one. There is just one single page for both Project and User searches. Test users expressed in feedback about the design with links to multiple search pages not very appealing.
Reactivity: Keep the reactivity between searching for projects or users. There are two forms, one for searching projects and the other for searching users. Reactivity while searching either projects or users is still available.
Clean-up: Clean up old html and js files from the old search pages.
Admin: Created a base site admin page. Currently all users, whether they are site admins or not is able to view the page if they type /admin at the end of the URL in the address bar. Also there is a admin link in the header which is only viewable if a user is a site admin.

February 15: Features/Enhancements

During this milestone period I focused on giving more functionality to the admin page. I ultimately want admins to be able to edit users, projects and skills. So far I was able to give admins the capability to view all the skills that users have entered via user profiles or project profiles and the ability to add, or delete, skills into the ‘Skills’ collections themselves.

Collections Totals: Admins can now see the total number of projects, users and skills the website currently has. Within the admin page totals are given to each set of collections. There are boxes on the right side of the browser for each collection and within each of those boxes displays the total number of documents found for their respective collection.
Edit Skills: Edit skills UI (for admins) created.
Skills List: In the 'Edit Skills' page admins can see a list of all the skills. The skills are pulled from the collection where all the skills that users enter to update their profiles and project profiles are being stored. The list also displays the skills in alphabetical order and a delete button next to each skill. The list is reactive and will change if there are any changes to the skills collection without having to refresh the page.
Add Skill: In the 'Edit Skills' page admins can enter a new skill. Skills already in the collection will not be re-added (code for catching duplicate entries had been already implemented last semester).
Remove Skill: In the 'Edit Skills' page admins can remove a skill. When a user deletes a skill from the 'Skills' collection the deleted skill is also deleted from all users and projects that had the deleted skill in their profile.
Fixed bug: Formerly when updating a projects 'wanted skills' attribute newly entered skills are not added to the skill graph collection. Skills are now added correctly to the skills graph collection when a skill that is not in the collection has been entered.

For the next milestone I hope to finish up the rest of the site admin pages. I plan on implementing the capability for site admins to view all projects and users in the Alloy collections. I am still coming up with ideas to what extent the site admins would have on each different project or user. A big part of my next milestone will be brainstorming those ideas.

March 1: Features/Enhancements

I continued my work on the site admin page and capabilities. During this milestone I wanted to place the majority of my focus towards finishing as much of the site admin pages as possible. I wanted to complete the pages for the site admin’s user interface to display all projects and all users that are currently in the system. I also created template cards for users that can be used in other parts of the website, for example search results.

Admin Projects UI: I kept the UI for displaying projects simple. I used a modified semantic ui 'relaxed divided list' for the display. Each project is displayed with their Project name at the top, with a bigger font size. In each divided project section the following information is displayed: The project admins, the number of members, when the project was created, and when the project was last modified.
Admin Projects Logic: The logic for displaying the information is very simple. I imported the Projects collection to the javascript file and then set a loop to display all projects. I also used underscore to alphabetically sort all the projects.
Admin Users UI: The site admin's user UI is a little more complicated than the projects UI. I used semantic ui's 'raised stackable cards' to display all the users. I had to create a card template for users which I'll get to in another bullet in this milestone's features. The following user information is displayed: Username, first and last name, number of skills, and number of projects.
Admin Users Logic: The logic is again very simple. I imported the Users collection and made a loop to display all user information. The only difference between the user logic and project logic is that I called the user template card to hold the information of the users. I used the template cards because I wanted to see if the display would be more appearling. I also used underscore to alphabetically sort the usernames.
User Template Card: Template card that can be called from any page to create nice cards to display user information. Creating the template cards wasn't originally in my plan for this milestone. I happened to think of the idea when I was making the Edit Users UI. I wanted to play around with the UI and see what I can do.

During these last few milestones I’ve come across quite a few bugs in the website. I have been creating issues for them in the GitHub repository as I find them. I will devote sometime during this milestone to fix as much of the bugs as I can. Some features I do hope to get work done on are: Creating functionality to the admin feed, giving site admins the ability to edit all user profiles and project profiles, and changing the search results of searching for users to implement the user template cards I created.

March 15: Features/Enhancements

This milestone I wanted to shift my focus on features other than the site admin functionalities. I ended up enhancing the search results for users and fixing a bug regarding projects and the number of project members. In regards to site admin features I created a site adming feed collection and gave site admins the ability to edit both user profiles and project profiles.

Search Results: I did not like how the search results for user looked like. There was too many empty space and I thought that was I waste. I implemented the user cards I created from another milestone as the user search results. Rows of four user cards will be displayed when user search results are populated.
Admin Feed: I created a collection for admin feed messages. It contains the following attributes: username of the person reporting the message, the time stamp of the messge, and the message.
Site Admin Scope: I have given site admins the capability to go to different user profiles and project profiles and be able to edit all information that the users themselves and the project admins for a project are able to edit.
Bug: In the past when all members of a project left a project the project would just sit there and no one would be able to edit or do anything with the project. It would just be useless data taking up space. Now I made it so that when the last member of a project leaves the project will delete itself. So a project that has zero members will be removed automatically when the last member leaves.

Next milestone I plan on completing the site adming features. I want the admin feed to show notifications from users in regards to user and profile being able to be reported if they contain profanity or anything vulgar. I also want to add a contact page where users can write messages that will show up in the admin feed for suggestion or comments.

April 1: Features/Enhancements

I was able to complete all the parts of the site admin pages. A feed that notifies site admins of reports created by users is populated and displayed on the site admin page. I also created the ability for users to able to report a profile page for ‘users’ and ‘projects’. There were two bugs I was able to fix as well.

Report Users: Users can report a user profile page by clicking the red report button. The report is generated and entered into an admin feed collection. Some of the data that is stored are the following: User who made the report, the User who is being reported, the timestamp of the report, a precreated message of the report (will add the feature of user created messages at a later time).
Report Projects: Users can report a project profile page by clicking the red report button. The report is generated and entered into an admin feed collection. Some of the data that is stored are the following: User who made the report, the Profile who is being reported, the timestamp of the report, a precreated message of the report (will add the feature of user created messages at a later time).
Populate Site Admin Feed: In the site admin page a feed of all reports is populated and displayed. The reports are displayed by the newest reports first. Site admins can delete reports by clicking a delete button next to the report they want to remove.
Bug (project member links): Prior to the fix all the users in the members list of a project's profile page would link to the users own profile page instead of the member. Now the members list correctly links to each member of the project.
Bug (project manage members): Prior to the fix when a user successfully invites a uesr to join the project two modals display. The successful modal and the invalid user modal. Now only the successful modal appears if successful and the invalid modal appears only when the user input is invalid.

For the next milestone I would like to create a ‘contact us’ page where users can create messages for site admins for comments or suggestions. This would be entered into the admin feed collection and displayed with the reports on the site admin page. I also want to correct more bugs.

April 15: Features/Enhancements

The major feature I was able to implement this milestone is the email functionality of the Alloy site. I integrated some email notifications with certain actions users do (I’ll go into further detail below). I’ve also fixed a number of issues that were months old regarding bugs my team and I found while adding new features and enhancements.

Email Support: I installed the 'meteor email' package to our app. It was pretty easy, I just had to run a command into the terminal and it automatically installed all necessary components regarding email and meteor. I used two webpages to help me with the rest of the process. [Meteor Docs](https://docs.meteor.com/api/email.html) and [Meteor Chef (Email Package)](https://themeteorchef.com/tutorials/using-the-email-package). The Meteor Chef site pretty much goes step by step with the setup process.
Email Notification (project invite): An email notification is sent to a users hawaii.edu account when a project admin invites that user to their project. It's a simple text message stating the user who sent the invite and the project for which the invite is to.
Email Notification (project request to join): An email notification is sent to all project admins of a project when a request to join occurs. The email states the username of the user requesting to join and the name of the project related to the request.
Bug (duplicate project names): I've implemented a catch case in the projects creation js file to stop the creation of a project if it finds an existing project with the same name, regardless of case. A modal pops up warning the user of the issue and brings the user back to the project creation screen when the modal disappears. No user input has been changed. The user just needs to change the name of the project for the project creation to successfully complete.
Bug (request to join project): I created a bug earlier that stops the request to join projects button from working correctly. I've fixed the issue and users can now join any number of projects.

For my next milestone I plan on adding more email functionality. I want to create an invite your friends page where users can enter a friend’s UH Manoa username and Alloy will send that friend a message to go to the Alloy website and join. I also want to fix more bugs.

May 1: Features/Enhancements

Invitations: Users can send an email invitation to their friends if they have their UH username. If their friend is already in the Alloy system a message will popup letting them know.
HTML Email Notifications: Instead of text based email messages I made the notifications html based. It's more for looks than anything else but I'm sure I need someone with more of a design eye to create the html messages to be more appealing.
Remove Project: Site admins can remove projects from the Projects collection. When a project is removed the project is removed from all users project attribute and project admin attribute.
Restrict User: Site admins can place a user into a restricted status. A restricted user can navigate around the Alloy website but they are not able to use the following functionalities; The invitation function, create project function, report user/project, or edit any project/user page. When a user is put into, or taken off, restricted status they are emailed a notification.
Search Parameters: Prior to the update all skills in the skills collection populated the dropdown menu of skills users can choose from to search for a project or user. Now only skills that have a related project or user is displayed.
Bug (abandon change button): The button use to navigate to a page that didn't exist and displayed an error. The button now navigates back to the project page.
Bug (project admin links): Links now navigate to the displayed user.

I plan on trying to make the project description area markdown capable. I also want to implement a profanity filter for user input.