Hello giffgaffers and welcome to the latest edition of the community platform team’s dev diary! It’s my turn to take on the entry this week and I thought I would quickly follow on from the tech-talk I started in my previous post and discuss the frontend of the community platform a little more.
The community frontend, which is all the visible parts our members can see, is built using a modern client-side JavaScript framework called Mithril. This framework is small, fast and provides core components like routing and XHR utilities out of the box - unlike rival frameworks. It's a simpler, yet more capable version of Facebook’s React, replacing the need for libraries like jQuery - but is not completely alien to understand and won’t leave you bamboozled. In fact, if you are familiar with React then the learning curve is easy peasy and not too long at all. Mithril's small size makes it ideal for building single-page applications or embedded JavaScript widgets. Although this snazzy little framework could be considered relatively unknown, it does have backing from quite large organisations such as Vimeo and Nike - who use it in their technology stacks.
Private Discussions
@ianmorland and myself have been focusing on private discussions this week, in particular, completing work on tools for educators to handle content reports within PDs and getting that into production. You’ll also notice that you can now sort your private discussions in the same way as normal discussions - woohoo!
Photography tags
@ajapayne has been focusing on improving the look and feel of the Photography tag with updates to the layout of the tag page and a nifty lightbox feature so that larger images can be displayed in all the glory you intended them to be viewed in. These cracking improvements are nearly ready and should be released next week, so keep an eye out for the changes and let us know what you think.
UX Improvements
@harrycollins97 and @annesolano have continued to do marvellous work on further improvements to the design of the community. We won’t go into too much detail about things they have been working on lately, but one of the things they have spent some time this week has been changes to the best answer button - making it more obvious to use and changing how it behaves on click. You should see this in a future release.
Thank you for taking the time to read and make sure you keep an eye out next week for another diary entry.
Have a lovely weekend everybody, over and out!
