Status update - December 2017

There hasn’t been much visible progress in Slipmat development for a while, so here are some news on whats happening in near future.

Upcoming updates

First, there will be two large updates in next few weeks. First of these will probably happen at some time next weekend or early next week. This one brings vast amount of technical updates to the codebase and underlying techniques enabling us to keep evolving the site with a fast pace plus some minor bug fixes and features. The next update after that is slated for January 1 and it will bring lots of new features including easier event creation, smarter flow for ended events, recurring events, and lots of improvements to the already great request system.

New release model for 2018

In order to keep the development pace high and the workflow as visible as possible, we’re testing a new process for upcoming releases. Starting early January the site updates will be feature-based and they will be planned and designed publicly here on Backstage.

What this means is that we’ll use Feature requests and Issues -boards as a source for upcoming development phases (sprints). We’ll collect one or more features + reported bugs as a main focus point for the next sprint, and the next development phase will focus on that fixed list of items. Releases will happen when all of the items are done and then the cycle starts again.

This workflow will hopefully make the development process more visible and encourage more participation from the community. Release cycles will vary depending on the decided contents of each sprint and of course also depending on the available developer time and resources. Ideally we could make at least 1-2 sprints per month.

…which brings us to the next point!

Call for developers

Slipmat.io is 100% a community effort. At the moment almost all of the actual development (coding) to the project is done by me, but hopefully we can change that. If you are familiar with modern Web development and want to help, contact me (for example private message me here or ping me at Twitter)!

At the moment the developer needs can be categorised roughly in these three categories:

  • Back End coding (Python / Django)
  • Front End coding (JavaScript / Vue)
  • Front End markup / graphic design (HTML / Sass / graphic tools)

if you know any of these, you can help. Or even if you don’t but you want to learn, you probably still can help! You don’t need to be a guru at anything, this is a volunteer project and you will get help and support from others :slight_smile:

in addition of actual coding the community needs lots of help in various other topics like

  • Helping new users
  • Writing documentation
  • Marketing / social media

Everyone can help, you can help – if you want to! Reply here or contact me if you want to discuss more. Also check out the help wanted-topic for more! :slight_smile:

Time to give update to the update :slight_smile: As painfully usual in software projects, the timetable for these upgrades have been slipping. Turns out that some of the bigger under the hood upgrades resulted in major rewrite for literally every page on the site so the amount of work needed went through the roof. But this is the price for faster development cycles in the future, so I’m willing to pay it at this stage.

The upgrades mentioned above are about 65% done but the timetable for the release is currently open as I don’t have any more free days to work fully on the project. It’s going to be another classic “we’ll release when it’s done” schedule from now on.

IMG_8144

But to end with some good news, we’ll get some long awaited extra goodies with the next upgrade, like this mobile-friendly (now universally used through the site) way better upload / crop widget for uploading photos! Lots of other usability and accessibility -related enhancements are also coming, it really feels that this all is worth the wait :slight_smile:

Meanwhile, if you’d like to help, keep on reporting bugs and see above post for more info!

It’s been almost a week since the last update and lots has happened in the meanwhile. Currently most of the UI-functionality is back and I’ve slowly been able to bring back much of the functionality. Here’s a preview of the current state of user account page:

Old

slipmatio_account_old

New

slipmatio_account_new

(Yes, there are some hints of new functionality, too!)

The work continues during the weekend and I’ll try to give you at least one more update before we get to launch this megaupgrade! :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Let’s continue the status updates of the megaupgrade. First the good news: things are starting to look good on the DJ-side of things. The admin UI looks and feels much better and there are some new functionality, too. Here’s a preview of the admin index page taken with a tablet-sized viewport:

Old

slipmat_dj_admin_index_old

New

slipmat_dj_admin_index_new

The new page is much cleaner and yet manages to pack more information and functionality.

Then the bad news: there are still a lot to be done before we can push this to production. To get some idea of the vastness of the amount of required work, here are just the pages that need to be fixed:

  • DJ Profile edit
  • DJ Profile edit photo
  • DJ Profile create
  • DJ Event Create
  • DJ Stream Now
  • DJ Event Edit
  • DJ Event Start
  • DJ Event Stats/Archive (detail)
  • Tip Dashboard
  • Sign Up Process
    • Sign Up Form
    • Hello Page
    • DJ Hello Page
  • Live Page
  • Live Requests
  • Live Tipping
  • Live Chat
  • Homepage for anonymous
  • Homepage for logged in users
  • PlaylistConverter
  • Admin Tools
  • Code of Conduct
  • Community Diversity Statement
  • Beta Invite

…so, quite a lot of work still. Some of the above are small, but some require hours of work. But, the direction is right and we are getting there, slowly but surely! :slight_smile:

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Good Hello, slipmatians! The work on the megaupdate has been going on steady this week. Most of the efforts have been focused on the DJ-side of things. As an example of this weeks results, here’s a couple of screenshots of old and new event creation form in wide tablet size:

Old

slipmat_schedule_event_old

New

slipmat_schedule_event_new

The new page has the same functionality but is much cleaner and easier to use. And unlike the current page, the new page is very usable on smaller, even phone-sized screens.

There is still a lot to be done with DJ-related functionality and because of gigs and other life, there probably wont be much happening this weekend around this. I’ll post another update when there’s something to write about! :slight_smile:

3 Likes

It’s bee a while, time for another update. The good news: we’re almost there! The bad news: we’re not there yet :slight_smile:

At the moment the list of pages that need fixing has shrunk to these:

  • Homepage for anonymous
  • Beta Invite
  • Sign Up Process
    • Sign Up Form
    • Hello Page
  • DJ Profile create
  • PlaylistConverter

Most of the needed fixes are small, but there will be quite a lot to clean up after everything is working. The big production push will probably happen tomorrow or on Sunday, and the next smaller bugfix release a week after that.

There has also been some quite interesting new things happening in the background, I’m super excited to get to share these also very soon! :slight_smile:

Final update to this topic! I’ll push few separate updates to the site during the week starting today, and the final visible part hopefully on Thursday. I don’t have much time for fixes and firefighting during the weekend because of gigs and travelling so if everything is not ready by Thursday, it will have to wait until next week.

Complete release notes will be published after everything is tested in production :slight_smile:

Okay, this is actually happening! :slight_smile:

One more update here to clarify the situation. Decided to split the upgrade into smaller parts, hence there will be several days worth of intermittent disruptions while we get everything online and rolling smoothly. The DJ profile creation has also been temporarily disabled so that we can do the upgrade in smaller parts.

When everything in this upgrade is online and tested, I’ll post full release notes and other info in a separate post. Meanwhile, stay tuned and hang on, this is going to take few days…

Yet another status update. During the weekend and yesterday there has been lots of small fixes to the first half of new functionality. These fixes resolve problems with login, registration, event creation, event editing, event stats and homepage. Now that most of the new stuff seems to be stable, we’ll push forward with the other half of the updates!

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