[Devel] UI thoughts, for editing projects' bug trackers on the web: Requesting comments

[Asheesh Laroia]

Toward the end of the last milestone, I was implementing a user 
interface for letting people use the web interface on OpenHatch to edit 
the bug trackers associated with their project.

The idea was to clean up the work that Jack did, months ago, that 
lives on the web at e.g. 
https://openhatch.org/customs/edit/roundup/OpenHatch (and 
https://openhatch.org/customs/ generally).

The goal was to improve things in the following way:

Project maintainers should be able to go from their project page (e.g. 
https://openhatch.org/+project/OpenHatch ) to a page that shows them how 
to add a bug tracker to our system, so that we crawl it.

== What I started, and why it sucked ==

What I started doing was taking the "project edit" interface -- what you 
get if you click "Edit" on https://openhatch.org/+projects/OpenHatch , and 
you land at https://openhatch.org/+projedit/OpenHatch -- and add a new tab 
called "Bug trackers".

So far, so good.

What I was doing was taking the 
https://openhatch.org/customs/edit/roundup/OpenHatch page and copying it 
so that it could appear under a +projedit URL.

As I made it possible to list bug trackers from within the project page, I 
realized that since some bug trackers create bugs for more than one 
project, their bug tracker editing UI would have many URLs: One per 
"projedit" page.

They needed to be different pages because, in the projedit analog of 
https://openhatch.org/customs/edit/roundup/OpenHatch , the "Back to 
trackers list" link should take you back to all trackers for the project 
whose projedit page you were just looking at.

It ended up getting really ugly. I didn't finish it by the end of the 
milestone, and I looked away in horror when considering when to make time 
to finish it.

== New proposal ==

I'm going to:

* Create a new tab at https://openhatch.org/+projedit/OpenHatch labeled 
"Bug trackers"

* On that page, you will see a list of all bug trackers that have created 
bugs for the project

* These will just be links to the existing /customs/ UI pages, like 
https://openhatch.org/customs/edit/roundup/OpenHatch

* If you have JavaScript turned on, when you click that link, you won't 
actually go to the page. Instead you will see a modal dialog box with 
*just* the edit UI, and with no "Back to trackers list" link. Instead 
it'll have an (X) around it. (Like when you go to 
http://floyd-dev.mirocommunity.org/ and scroll to the bottom and click 
"Log in".)

That way, I don't have to copy those UI elements; I just have to wrap them 
in a slick JavaScripty frame.

== Requesting comments ==

I'd love to know what people think about this idea. I'll probably start 
implementing it on Friday night, or else on the weekend.

-- 
-- Asheesh.

http://asheesh.org/

Q:	What's the difference betweeen USL and the Graf Zeppelin?
A:	The Graf Zeppelin represented cutting edge technology for its time.