GSoC 2021 potential proposal feedback

[muskanvaswan]

Hello, I am Muskan Vaswan, I’ve been using Django for the past two years and would like to now participate in GSoC and would love to contribute to Django.

Having contributed to Django before, I was surprised to notice that our Django issue Tracker and quite a few more pages in the code.djangoproject.com are not mobile flexible/responsive/compatible. I feel the problem is self-explanatory. I would attach a screenshot if possible, however, if you haven’t already noticed it this is an example page that I’m talking about if I would love to fix this. Especially, the issue tracker. I would want to do this regardless of GSoC, but it would be great if I could do this along with more such pages as a GSoC project.

Is this use case relevant and the fix large enough to warrant a GSoC project? I would love your views and suggestions.

[Valz]

A couple of questions:

• What are the advantages of this new design over the current one?
• Are said advantages worth the time and effort? (More or less, is there another UI area of work with a better return on investment?)
• Is the design of the issue tracker a problem for current developers or new contributors or both? (ie does it constitute a hurdle in the development cycle of django?)

I like the current issue tracker and I think it provides good functionality with a decent design. I’d appreciate it if other people chimed in as well to answer the last point

[carltongibson]

Hi @muskanvaswan.

TBH, I’d be sceptical that this would fit what we’re looking for.

We use Trac. https://trac.edgewall.org Adding a responsive theme would be something to consider adding there I think (rather than something for Django itself…)

We’re looking to update the Trac instance to the latest version, and that occurs periodically, so a responsive theme added would get picked up as part of that process.

[muskanvaswan]

I might be misunderstanding this, but I find that I’m unable to grasp what you meant. Perhaps, I didn’t express myself well enough. The page I’m referring to is code.djangoproject.com/query. The problem I’m referring to is shown in the screenshot below, which shows the page on a mobile device.

Whether or not this is a valid GSoC proposal, I do think that this is something that we should fix. While this part of the website I agree is more frequently visited through the desktop, in case it is ever visited using a mobile device it is not an appealing sight, to say the least. Most good websites these days are platform friendly, so making the website equally accessible through a mobile device in my opinion is something that is more of a functionality requirement than a question of prettiness.

I’m not sure if this is exactly what your response was in reference to, if it was, I think I understand if this isn’t a preferable GSoC project but I would pose the question of whether this is something we could fix anyway, without it being a GSoC project. If not, it would help if you shared your views on this.

[carltongibson]

Hi @muskanvaswan, Yes - both counts.

Yes, it’s not a suitable GSoC project.

But yes, if it can be improved then super.

You’d need to dig into the Trac instance:

django/code.djangoproject.com

I don’t know if this is something we can fix ourselves, or if it should be fixed upstream in the Trac project itself.

I hope that clarifies!

Kind regards,
Carlton