[GSOC] Plugins Website Progress as of 12th August 2013

[Bhaskar Kandiyal]

Hi everyone,

Apologies for not sending in a progress report last week as my college
just started and the first couple of weeks are a bit hectic.

Here are some things that I've been working on:

* Completely re-organized the website backend and removed
inconsistencies in the database models. Now it's easier to manage the
code as it's divided into small Django apps for easy maintenance.

* Improved platform detection on the website and now it uses
user-specific session cookies rather than passing the platform
information everytime through URL parameters. This would be helpful when
accessing the website from the plugins window. The platform detection is
triggered only when a 'platform=detect' GET parameter is passed to the
website otherwise it defaults to showing all the platforms.

* Plugin ID's are now used almost everywhere on the website.

* I've converted the whole website to Bootstrap 3 since it scales better
to small screen devices (like the web view in the plugins window) and it
also looks much better.

* The layout of the website has been changed a little bit as well. Eion
suggested to use a similar header as that of pidgin.im so I'm
experimenting a little bit with the logo and navbar positions.

* Filters are now supported in the plugins window so users can filter
plugins by their state 'Enabled' or 'Disabled' and in the future
categories can also be added to it.

Apart from the above I've been experimenting with some authentication
backends for the website, we can use OpenID but I think there are not
many good third-party OpenID Django apps that support Python 3. Maybe we
can fork one and convert it to Python 3 (just a thought). I'm still
searching for some way to authenticate users based on an existing Trac
database but I couldn't find any API for Trac that would allow
authentication.

PS: It seems deploying the website to OpenShift always breaks whenever
theres some significant changes in the database models so I've reverted
back to the 'working' website. I'll get it fixed by tomorrow most
probably :)

Cheers,
Bhaskar Kandiyal