Portal Dev Blog #1

[Will 4,660]

I've had an itch to do some writing lately and what better to talk about than the VHL Portal. I'll be doing these sporadically to get feedback/suggestions, tease new features, and rant about my struggles. 

 

For the past while my focus has been revisiting older areas to clean up the code base, of course making small improvements along the way (for example, the various statistic pages that I upgraded in the last release were, in fact, the very first pages that existed on the Portal). While this isn't the most exciting work, it is ultimately necessary as, over time, the code base has grown large and some areas are/were quite unruly to work with. 

 

I now find myself in the depths of the whole Team Management system, by far the largest (and messiest) 'area' of the Portal. It has gotten so large and disjointed that it was challenging to make basic improvements and extremely daunting to even consider adding all-new features. This was of course untenable as Team Management needs many improvements. And so I am now at work on the only logical solution, re-writing every page and function. Quite a painful process indeed but one that will make it much easier to build on later, plus its a good chance to incorporate some of the improvements and features people have been asking for. 

 

A few of the more public improvements/features I'm hoping to have at the end of this process:

• Improvements to the automated forum posts/notifications related to transactions
• A VHL/VHLM transaction tracker that'll allow people to keep track of everything from signings to trades to retirements in one place 
• All new Trade interface, potentially supporting 3 way trades 
• Improvements to the Drafting interface, plus support for passing on picks
• Improvements to Free Agency/Waivers interface, including a listing of FA signings so far that season
• Allowing GM's to set Assistant GM's, giving them to access the Team Management area(s) 

[Beaviss 4,956]

I like all of this except your profile picture

[Will 4,660]

6 minutes ago, Beaviss said:

I like all of this except your profile picture

 

New features will be available to all GMs except you 

[Beaviss 4,956]

3 minutes ago, Will said:

 

New features will be available to all GMs except you 

 

[Nykonax 1,563]

44 minutes ago, Will said:

Allowing GM's to set Assistant GM's, giving them to access the Team Management area(s)  

Yes please.

 

Can you also add a notes section to trades, because a lot of the VHL trades have 6th's and 7th's involved, so it'd be nice to have a notes section where a team can add a note, and the bot with post the trade along with the note.

[Will 4,660]

1 minute ago, Nykonax said:

Can you also add a notes section to trades, because a lot of the VHL trades have 6th's and 7th's involved, so it'd be nice to have a notes section where a team can add a note, and the bot with post the trade along with the note.

 

Good call! 

[Acydburn 1,595]

4 minutes ago, Will said:

 

Good call! 

Why not just enable it to have picks from rounds 1-8 and that way you can keep track of it? 

[Will 4,660]

4 minutes ago, Acydburn said:

Why not just enable it to have picks from rounds 1-8 and that way you can keep track of it? 

 

I believe for S69 and going forward, 7 rounds were created automatically. S68 would be the last season where only 4 rounds were created automatically, I ought to create the other 4 rounds manually probably. 

[Quik 4,113]

16 hours ago, Will said:

Improvements to the Drafting interface, plus support for passing on picks 

 

And my other draft feature?

 

[Josh 1,651]

When your blog turns into a Q and A

[NotAVHLM-GM 1,858]

The thing that stands out in this thread is a guy with a beavis avatar complaining about a daenerys avatar. 

I know your backstory beaviss, but Will's avatar is better to look at  

[Will 4,660]

2 hours ago, Green said:

The thing that stands out in this thread is a guy with a beavis avatar complaining about a daenerys avatar. 

I know your backstory beaviss, but Will's avatar is better to look at  

 

Some people into weird things I guess.....

[Will 4,660]

1 minute ago, Sonnet said:

What are you coding in? Took up a web dev internship this summer, so I've learned a little bit of a lot of different elements of webpages and such.

 

Figured some time down the line I might offer to help with the Portal if I was familiar with the tech/help was needed.

 

Backend is built on Django (a Python web framework if you aren't familiar) 

 

Frontend is just Bootstrap and jQuery 

[Will 4,660]

4 minutes ago, Sonnet said:

I've seen/heard of Django, but haven't toyed around with either it or Python. Sounds like you built an API for the backend, though, that you're accessing with jQuery AJAX requests?

 

 

@Josh has set up an API for some things but presently it's only used with the Discord bot. Where we're just using a simple front end, Django's views/templates can handle what we need, including AJAX requests, more simply than via direct API (at least IMO but I'm far more comfortable in Python than JS/jQuery so I'd rather do most of the work there). 

 

If we ever decided to move to a full JS front end like Angular we'd definitely need to go full API. 

[Josh 1,651]

1 hour ago, Will said:

 

@Josh has set up an API for some things but presently it's only used with the Discord bot. Where we're just using a simple front end, Django's views/templates can handle what we need, including AJAX requests, more simply than via direct API (at least IMO but I'm far more comfortable in Python than JS/jQuery so I'd rather do most of the work there). 

 

If we ever decided to move to a full JS front end like Angular we'd definitely need to go full API. 

 

Yeah the api was re-implemented in a way where we could potentially switch to a full front-end design in the future... having said that a lot of our Django models are quite complex and redoing the front end is not really on our radar. 

 

I personally like the design of the portal quite a bit, so props to @Will on that. I doubt I could have done better.

[Beaviss 4,956]

The warp drive needs an ion pulse generator and flux capacitor to induce the quantum drive.

[Will 4,660]

29 minutes ago, Josh said:

I personally like the design of the portal quite a bit, so props to @Will on that. I doubt I could have done better.

 

I have to give @Beketov some credit for coming up with the basic look and feel: 

 

Im very design-challenged. Bootstrap is a godsend. 

[Dil 1,756]

 

 

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On 7/16/2019 at 2:49 PM, Will said:

• Improvements to the automated forum posts/notifications related to transactions
• A VHL/VHLM transaction tracker that'll allow people to keep track of everything from signings to trades to retirements in one place 
• All new Trade interface, potentially supporting 3 way trades 
• Improvements to the Drafting interface, plus support for passing on picks
• Improvements to Free Agency/Waivers interface, including a listing of FA signings so far that season
• Allowing GM's to set Assistant GM's, giving them to access the Team Management area(s) 
• Implementing the draft lottery Mr. SENIOR administrator.