[Expo-tech] to-do list for troggle work

[Mark Shinwell]

Phil, I don't see why it needs to be hosted on the Expo server, nor
"controlled" by us.  This is really a fallacy and a trap that I think is
easy to fall into, especially given our nerd backgrounds.

What I would have thought we _do_ need is:

- Ease of use, especially for non-nerds, with documentation / help pages
- Reliability
- Security
- Low management overhead

To a lesser extent, being able to archive what's there, although (whilst I
am fully in favour of having good archives) that seems less important here
than for some other items of data.

I don't see how we can get the above without using something that is
professionally hosted.  From what I've seen at work, Github is probably the
best at present.  With regard to Github specifically, there is a full API,
and there is also a basic service for sending emails upon every piece of
text being added to an issue.  I would be very surprised if those didn't
suffice for archiving purposes; it might just take a bit of code if you
want something flashy.  I may be able to dig up some code for dealing with
issues actually -- the OCaml project I work on did a major transition from
Mantis to Github recently and we brought all of the issues over
automatically.

Mark

--

On Thu, 26 Mar 2020 at 21:06, Philip Sargent (Gmail) <
philip.sargent at gmail.com> wrote:

> TL;DR - see http://expo.survex.com/handbook/computing/x-todo.html
>
> Now that I am up to 3 pages of to-do list items for surveyscans and
> troggle,
> plus sundry Post-Its, I really need to get them typed up somehow.
>
> The last time we discussed this everyone agreed that the GitHub Issues
> system had everything we needed *except* that we did not control it and
> could not archive it.
>
>
> Ideally we would like something as pretty and easy to use as
> https://github.com/CaveSurveying/CUCCexposurveyissues/issues
> but hosted on the expo server. But *without* the maintenance headache of
> actually installing yet another bit of software
> (e.g. trac https://trac.edgewall.org/report/2  or MantisBT
> https://mantisbt.org/bugs/my_view_page.php )
>
> But really we only need something much, much simpler:
>
> https://www.cssscript.com/demo/simple-todo-list-web-app-with-javscript-and-l
> ocalstorge/
> <https://www.cssscript.com/demo/simple-todo-list-web-app-with-javscript-and-localstorge/>
> or
> https://codepen.io/heydon/pen/VpVNKW/
>
> A single-page to-do list animated by Javascript would be fine. But shared
> online storage is the issue.
> We don't want to leverage off GDrive, Dropbox of whatever (though those
> would allow us to archive everything ourselves) and we don't want to run
> another process on the expo server (though a very simple one might be OK)
>
> So the example I am trying out uses the "Edit this page" capability built
> into troggle, leveraging the tinyMCE HTML editor we already have.
>
> This not-quite-yet proof of concept uses a rather fragile load of CSS to do
> the show/hide stuff.
>
> I note that the _edit page providing the tinyMCE HTML editor always has the
> same authentication string in it
> <form action="" method="post"><input type='hidden'
> name='csrfmiddlewaretoken' value='VmwOJjTjLNI0WFy3CbKPkrihwJ2O5puA' />
> which is presumably a bug or misconfiguration of troggle, but would make
> building  this really much easier if the bug is not fixed.
>
> Currently it looks as if it is a useable system but it is not:
> * editing <ul> and <li> is too fiddly and time-consuming  to get right, and
> if it is not right the show/hide CSS fails.
> * the show/hide is not local to each section.
>
> Maybe the CSS could be made more robust but I think just writing some
> Javascript would be easier to do and to maintain.
>
> Philip
>
>
>
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