Outreachy May-August 2017

[Jeremy Newman]

Hello Delight. I'm the current maintainer of the AppDB. So I'm the one 
to talk to when it comes to all things AppDB at the moment. Keep in mind 
though, I didn't write much of the current codebase. It has been 
community contributed. All of the old authors have moved onto other 
things. I have only recently started cleaning things up in some places 
in my spare time.

On 02/24/2017 10:32 AM, Delight Mawoyo wrote:
> I have not yet submitted a contribution but I have a local clone of the
> repo and would appreciate any suggestions for issues I could look at. I
> would ultimately like my work on appDB to center around rebuilding the
> entire site... I was honestly shocked when I saw the php code been run
> and how untidy the site is.

The code is very untidy for sure. It has had multiple attempts at 
rewrites over the years, and none of them actually finished. This has 
lead to the spaghetti you see now.

> Most of my work would center on changing the legacy php code structure
> to be powered by a PHP MVC framework... I had BonFire in mind.(basically
> CodeIgniter with a built in customiszable admin interface)
> For UI I would like to use Twitter Bootstrap and possibly use AngularJS
> for the user dashboard to make the site more responsive. The main site,
> the one indexable by search engines won't use AngularJS.

I'm not a fan of large frameworks for the backend. They tend to be 
overkill, and complex enough that we would get even less contributions 
to the code than we see now. I also dislike the chore of upgrading the 
framework itself, and then finding the modules need rewrites. It is bad 
enough that looking forward much code will have to be rewritten just for 
all the changes in PHP 7.0. If you decide to pursue a framework. I won't 
be able to help much I'm afraid.

For the frontend I've already started porting things over to bootstrap 
and jquery/jquery-ui. So, my preference is to stay that route and not 
convert to Angular.

Some smaller tasks I'd like to see done if you are interested:

  * https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39382 - AppDB needs a way to 
readily distinguish wine-staging versions from the development branch

  * https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12927 - Flat comment mode 
does not display any replies
If you ask me, we should just drop the threaded mode entirely, and keep 
the comments only in a flat mode.

A major task I need done is rewriting the screen shot code so the images 
are stored in multiple sizes on disk. That way they can be mirrored on 
our CDN. Right now, the images are dynamically sized each time they are 
viewed. This is a HUGE waste of resources. Only two sizes should be 
needed, the original full size, and a 250px (or so) thumbnail. Also, the 
images should not be saved on disk with the original file names. The one 
disk file should just be a unique id.

-N