Open Engineering Design

Project Activity

Two new updates to Protoforge have allowed for better visibility of project activity.  You will now see a "Recent Activity" list on the main project page.

The first update was a rework of how a user's current project is tracked.  Previously there was not a strong correlation of a protoforge object with the project that it belonged to making it difficult to track activity directly associated with a project.  A lot of behind the scenes work went in to getting this updated.  It also allowed for easily switching between projects on pages where it made sense, for example, the project membership page.  If you are a member of more than one project you now get a drop down menu at the top of the page that lets you switch easily between projects.

 The second update which was just posted tonight, updated all the function calls for logging activity as project members make edits, create objects, discuss objects and a ton of other actions.  Some work is still needed to fully cover every action on the site but most of the important actions are logged in association with the project.

This allows for recent activity to be displayed on the main project page with links directly to the relevant objects.  It also provides for a better "experience" value in the user's profile.  The experience value is weighted based on the action that takes place.  So logging in gets 1 point, posting in discussion gets 2 points, creating a requirement gets quite a bit more...  :)

I have also done some research on RSS feeds and have thought up a good scheme for implementing this.  Look for RSS 2.0 feeds of the project activity list in the near future.
 

Posted at 11:34PM Oct 25, 2007 by Aaron Schultz in General  |