Version 2.1.2

2.1.2

• Configure email in production for real password reset functionality (#27)
• Configured and began writing frontend unit tests with jest and React Testing
  Library.
• Improvements for contributors
  • Single boolean switch to go from dbsqlite to mysql in
    development_settings.py
  • Continue to maintain dev_setup.sh, which is not more descriptive and runs
    new frontend test suite on setup.
• Misc but fixes (#13, #20)

Post-Launch Bugs Fixed

As expected, a few bugs encountered after launch were quickly fixed. Additionally, there were some features that were clearly badly needed, especially associated with validating user uploaded spreadsheets and providing accurate and detailed responses.

Details below:

2.1.1

• Fix spreadsheet parsing bugs on the backend, mostly related to handling
  names with extra whitespace.
• Issue #21: Better error messages for invalid spreadsheets. The site will now
  provide a detailed "traceback" identifying each error and which row the
  error occured on.
  • missing name or link values
  • invalid links
• Validate group name length to enforce 15 character limit. Update CSS to
  make group names always display nicely.
• Scripts for develoment and dev ops
  • Automated database backup
  • Automated construction and destruction of mysql database through Docker
    for easy testing
• Misc bug fixes (#23, #15, #26)

v2.0.0

Finally the site has been shared, has users, and is active!

Version 2 Feature Set

• Users create galleries by uploading a csv file
• Galleries are immediately public
• Galleries are generated with a descriptive url slug (/gallery/[slug]/)

Future version 2.x releases will contain patches and bug fixes. Premium features pointed out in the project roadmap will come with a new major version.

Site Before Rewrite

This is the final incarnation of the project in its "old" infrastructure. Although functional, this version of the site turned out not to be cost-effective in production.

Screenshot Mechanism

Taking screenshots of students' work with Selenium/Chrome/Python was resource intensive and slow, and the distributed nature of this system adds significant complexity.

Data Layer

The very simple backend makes further development mostly impossible because the Gallery data model stores most information in a single JSON field.

Two Django Projects

There are two django projects: integrated_django_react, and screenshot_bot. The are entirely decoupled and communicate via REST API. The heavy lifting of running a web browser instance and taking screenshots had to be factored out onto a different machine to work at all.

Static Assets in S3 Missing

In the gallery, colored images were swapped out for the students' screenshots upon hovering over the tile to show their names. These colored images are not included in the git.

Mobile boundingClientRect Bug

There is a bug in mobile that throws lots of errors, but frontend bundle compilation on my Rasberry Pi is so slow and we are already so far down the path towards a new release, I just want to codify the site as it was in this state with a release and move on.