[GSoC] Better Onsite Management for Admins

[Rakesh-18112006]

@willgearty @kkbrum
Hi! I'm interested in the "Better Onsite Management for Admins" project for GSoC🙂.
After studying the existing onsite modules (BigBoard, OnsiteCheckin, OnsiteAttendance, etc.),
I noticed that the BigBoard (
bigboardmodule.py
) doesn't have responsive CSS — the gauges and charts overflow on mobile devices. Since the GSoC onsite management project focuses on mobile-friendly interfaces, would a PR to add responsive breakpoints to BigBoard be welcome?

This would be a good warm-up contribution before the main project 🙂.

[willgearty]

@Rakesh-18112006 Thanks for your interest in our GSoC project! I agree that that would be a good warm-up contribution. Let us know if you have any questions.

[Rakesh-18112006]

@willgearty Thanks! I've been studying the existing onsite modules (BigBoard, OnSiteCheckin, OnsiteAttendance, etc.) to understand the codebase. I'll submit a PR for the BigBoard responsive CSS shortly.

I'm also interested in the "Better Onsite Management for Admins" GSoC project (#2672). I had a couple of technical questions about the expected scope — would it be okay to ask those here, or should I open a separate discussion?

[willgearty]

Sure, happy to answer any technical questions you have here 👍

[Rakesh-18112006]

@willgearty
I've been going through the existing onsite modules (BigBoard,
OnSiteCheckin, OnsiteAttendance, etc.) to get a better understanding
of how things work, and had a few questions about the onsite webapp
project:

1. Would this be a brand new module on its own, or is the idea to
   bring the existing onsite modules together into one unified
   interface? I could see it going either way, so just wanted to
   check what you had in mind.

2. For the live-updating part — right now BigBoard does a full page
   reload every 2 minutes with a meta refresh tag. I'm thinking AJAX
   polling would be a good middle ground (fetch just the data, update
   the page without reloading). Would that work, or would you want
   something like WebSockets for truly instant updates?

3. For the "open/close registration per class" feature — does that
   mean changing the ClassSection status directly, or is it more about
   setting Permission deadlines for individual classes? I want to make
   sure I hook into the right part of the system.

Thanks!

[willgearty]

1. I think a lot of this is up to the person writing the proposal. As you note, we currently have a lot of existing infrastructure and pages, but those are all scattered in different places. A rework to put all of these into one place that is both desktop and mobile friendly would be fantastic. It's not immediately clear to me if that would be more or less work than making something from scratch that's designed for mobile like the existing student and teacher webapps (which also probably need to be reworked in the future, but that's out of scope for this project).
2. Yes, I think AJAX polling would be fine. We definitely want to be slamming our server constantly, so some middle group between instant updates and hard refreshing the page would be good.
3. Yes, this would be setting the "registration status" on a given ClassSection object.

[Rakesh-18112006]

Thanks for the clarification! That really helps narrow things down.

I'm leaning towards building a new mobile-first module (similar to
how the student and teacher webapps are structured) that pulls
together the key onsite features into one place. I think that would
give a cleaner result than trying to retrofit the existing modules
for mobile.

I'll put together a detailed proposal with mockups and share it.
Thanks again for taking the time to answer!

[Rakesh-18112006]

@willgearty
"While studying the onsite modules, I noticed
OnsitePaidItemsModule
is the only module without a JSON API endpoint — all other modules (class list, enrollment, check-in status) have AJAX-friendly JSON views. Would it be useful to add a payment_status_json endpoint? This would be helpful for building AJAX-based admin tools."

[willgearty]

I suppose that could be useful if we have paid status in the admin onsite web app.