bethlakshmi
commented
2 years ago I'm considering this one as my first big piece of work. Scratch pointed out that it would be better if our scheduling tool worked more like just about every common calendar app on the internet. And I agree.
The trick is, most great calendar apps (google, outlook, iOS) - are written by top notch front end engineers.
Which I am not.
Sexy stuff like drag and drop uses elements of browser manipulation that are new to me, and even some of the stuff that seems explainable using 1998 web technology (let's face it, 1998 is where I was hot shit JS coder), still takes some really clever nuanced front end thinking/UX design that I'm unlikely to be able to replicate manually.
So.... Open source to the rescue.
I'm planning to port our front end to an open source library and then put web-based APIs underneath it. We're actually not far from an API interface layer here - in an attempt to abstract the horror that is our scheduling backend, I put an isolation layer on top of it, which should be pretty straight forward to turn into a legit JSON or other schema API.
And for the Front End - my personal goal is to use React (a modern way of doing browser side coding - it all boils down to JS, but it's a way of doing some cool stuff with some level of sanity). That's what my day-job team uses, so getting smarter is a good investment for me, professionally.
Next step = look for React based open source calendar front ends that seem to give us the stuff we want as both schedulers and in the public app view.
Key requirements (check me on this @burlexpo ):
Scheduler stuff:
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schedule by picking a spot on the calendar and clicking to get a modal (popup) that lets you choose event contents (title, description, etc)
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schedule with a "ADD" button on the calendar view page, just in case you missed the previous option
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drag and drop to change times/days
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?? limit or get a warning if you book outside the conference days? - this isn't hard, but it's an extra constraint - do we actually care?
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Q: how to handle volunteer shift planning? Maybe that's follow on work - right now we have "parent" events and volunteer events as children - how to visually manage that within this calendar is what's tricky. I don't know of a calendar app that can handle this out of the box, so it's an add on either way.
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FYI - stuff like "and it malls people notifications" is out of scope - that's back end capability and it won't change.
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Public view (not editable):
- can include all the current bells and whistles - shows icons for interest selection, shows icons for course eval, shows other icons I forget what they are.
- has a day view, the week view and month view are less important
- also really nice in mobile web view
- has some sensible way of showing locations - it's not easy to find a calendar with locations as columns, because this doesn't port to mobile well at all
The public view stuff can be optional - IMO - because we don't have code sharing right now between the schedule building side and the public view side - so if we port the ugly scheduling side and don't port the public view, the public won't be hurt by that. But it's a nice to have as eliminating code is always nice.
Witnessed from the expo:
1 - it takes WAY too much clicking around to get to what you want to schedule. Move from the big filter that we currently use, to the calendar views we have. Put the "Create" button there, and make an "edit" button for existing events.
2 - remove "schedule" from the Special menu. "Expo Dates" can go under manage. Maybe have a special link to the calendars, in case we don't have active links to something at the moment.
3 - When editing an event: