By Private Profile 3ed3e09d on 2016-06-28 00:00 in GSoC 16 Improving the menu item workflow

Date: 28st Jun 2016 on Glip Chat

 Time: 14:30 (UTC / GMT)

Meeting was attended by: Shubham Rajput, Gunjan Patel, Peter Martin

 

• Congratulate Shubham on passing his midterm evaluation and his thoughts about it

 

Peter and Gunjan congratulate Shubham for passing his midterm evaluation. Here is the words from Shubham what he has experienced and how he is feeling after passing midterm evaluation.

“It’s been an awesome journey till now with joomla and you guys
Since the coding period started It’s been a different experience each week. Starting week I was nervous when i first dived in the component architecture. But you guys were there whenever i faced difficulty or when i went in wrong direction. Weekly meeting helped a lot.
Getting a new target and completing it gave more confidence to me with each passing week. In this coding period I also learnt many new things,went through some sleepless nights working on code and understanding the architecture of joomla more and more. Also went through mixed phases(pressure,relief,yay,nay). These are normal whenever we do coding
But in the end after passing the mid term evaluation I think that all of the above was worth it.
GSoC and involving with Joomla project is a experience which not everyone gets easily and it feels awesome to be a part of it.
Today i received mail from Google regarding your feedback on my work. After reading it I was really happy that i had not let you down. Kudos to all of us.”

 

• Presentation & Review on the previous week work

Previous week the first target was to make the menu link tab work. The problem occurring before was that after filling all the necessary information in the article edit view and menu link tab and clicking ‘save’ button results only in the saving of the article but no such save occurs in __menus table for menu item. The menu link tab was not working as it was intended.

 

Gunjan suggested to go through JModelAdmin functions and find the solution. After going through the JModelAdmin addtablepath() function solved the issue. The menu link tab started to work and menu item was being created. After that I was using database queries in order to get the component_id and article_id for menu data variable. Gunjan pointed out my mistake that controller is not the place to use queries and suggested alternate method. After that I used functions to retrieve both component_id and article_id which can be seen in this commit: https://github.com/joomla-projects/gsoc16_menu-for-article/pull/6/commits/be4dfb055e5d3186585cc228611d1b0e88e97049

Then after I improved the coding standard using camelCase notation which I missed, removing redundancy in the code and making changes that made code easily readable.

 

This marked the midterm evaluation target as success. Cheers to both my mentors and joomla community .

 

After following the advice of Peter and Gunjan I installed XDebug to debug the code more easily. I also went through the article that were suggested by Gunjan and Peter to understand hierarchical concept in mysql and understand what ‘lft’ and ‘rgt’ column meant in __content table.

 

Another resource was suggested by Gunjan to go through and understand the architecture of com_content coding. I went through https://issues.joomla.org/tracker/joomla-cms/10851

And understood what steps were used to improve the code style and reducing the code length using much more simpler method. I asked some doubts regarding the commit from @mbabker whose PR I was going through.

 

After that the next target was set to copy the article title and alias to menu title and alias using javascript and to make plan to make the functionality more generic. I have gone through this point and will discuss with both my mentors regarding this target.

 

• Timeline & Task for next week

Solve an issue with creating an menu alias from article title using javascript commit (Gunjan  + Peter will look at it to give some suggestions). Find different approaches to make the “Create Menu Item from Article Edit” functionality more generic so that other components can use it as well. Compile an overview with different approaches with their advantages / disadvantages, and suggest the best method in this case.

 

Tasks:

1. Copy Article title into menu item title using javascript onKeyUp function

2. To look through both methods, there advantages/disadvantages and discuss it with mentors, also look forward for new idea out of the box.

3. The current implementation sets 'language' => '*' in the newly created menu item. This might be a problem with multilingual articles on multilingual websites. New task is to use article’s language code to set the language code for the menu item.

 

• Open Questions

 

Shubham asked about PHPCS is working fine but when he tried to run it on administrator\components\com_content\views\article\tmpl\edit.php file it is showing 44 errors only for this files and Peter and Gunjan suggested to ignore them for now as they are due to the Joomla code style seems not so happy with inline control statements like:

 

• Resources to read & example suggested

https://docs.joomla.org/Plugin/Events/Content#onContentPrepareForm

 

Examples:

https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/blob/staging/plugins/user/profile/profile.php#L61

 

https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/blob/staging/plugins/user/profile/profile.php#L227

 

• Next meeting date & timing

Date: 5th July 2016 on Glip Chat

Time: 14:30 (UTC / GMT)