The next phase of the project was about building a more functional prototype, which could be used for user testing and then learning. This gave some valuable input on how to improve the prototypes and where to focus when building the next step. Hence, the website had been improved bit by bit by taking the comments and suggestions from the mentor. This was kind of a peer review approach. Additionally, suggestions from the audience have also been considered to improve the layout.
First of all, we realized that the `inqlude view` command should get an option to render with an alternative template. This can be used to implement the changes to the web site without making them to be used in production immediately. It could also be used to implement various alternatives and switch between them. Accordingly, we modified the `inqlude view` command to add a new option called `--templates` to generate the static HTML views from a directory defined by the user. With that, we could independently modify the layouts and generate the pages from different templates. Currently, we have two options for this parameter, they are `one-column` and `two-column`. Moreover, this had been validated, so that when use calls `inqlude view` with a `--templates` parameter with a non-existing directory, there should be an error message telling the user that the templates directory doesn't exist and inqlude should not try to generate the views.
Then we started redesigning the website. I always tried to keep the new layout similar to the previous one, so that regular users would not get confused. Actually, what we really wanted was to improve the existing site by adding new features and eliminating unwanted features. It was also important to keep the site more consistent throughout all the pages. Hence all the pages of the site had been designed to stay consistent with the colors, font styles, font sizes, headings, alignments and other significant formatting of the home page.
The task had been easy with template structure brought with Haml. Haml (HTML abstraction markup language) is based on one primary principle: that is markup should be beautiful. It’s not just beauty for beauty’s sake either. Haml accelerates and simplifies template creation as well. Thus using Haml templates had been useful for the cleanliness, readability and production speed of the website.
Few features and functionalities of the website are implemented in JavaScript and jQuery. Some of those features are search, addition of comments etc.
Moreover, each and every component that are used in the website have been planned in detail, then implemented and reviewed by my mentor. The functionalities have been validated properly using testing. With that, we concluded most of the project work.
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