Makahiki Widget Development

My exploration of the Makahiki platform continued this week. I tried my hand at adding a few new widgets that could be inserted into a different pages. (Apologies to any general readers: this will be a very Makahiki-specific post.)

I started by following the Hello World tutorial. This was fairly painless and gave a nice overview of the files and functions that comprise a widget.

Next, I built a Group Scoreboard widget. At this point I wished for a bit more of a high-level overview of how widgets should work. I wasn't sure where the best place would be to add new data-gathering code: within the template HTML page, within the related views.py, or in the corresponding manager library. I quickly learned that code within a Django template doesn't seem to handle any parentheses or parameters, so that left views.py or the manager classes. I ended up working with both of these.

Groups are closely related to teams, so there was a fair amount of existing code to review and cannibalize. But, as with any complex system, it is hard to quickly build a mental map from the bottom-up like this. I felt a bit like I was redecorating while stumbling around in a dark room.

I got my Group Scoreboard together, though. I also built two Group Resource Use widgets. This proved a little trickier since it involved "subclassing" a widget. I also initially missed the INSTALLED_COMMON_WIDGET_APPS setting in settings.py, so I couldn't figure out why my common template file couldn't be found while resource_goal's could be. Also, I made a few errors that prevented the server from starting, and so I spent a while trying to debug single-line error messages such as "Error: cannot import name Team". I learned about this command:

  ./manage.py shell --traceback

which provides a full stack trace on an error. This was invaluable for debugging.

By this point, I was running short on time. I skipped making a Group Prize widget and started on a couple group-related Status page widgets. I spent an hour or so trying to decide how best to gather the group data from the team scoring/ranking system that is spread between score_mgr and team_mgr. I started toying with a plan to filter the team data to include only those in one group. As I neared the point to start testing it, I realized I didn't know exactly how the existing score widgets were placed on the Status page.

Specifically, I found the two templates (team_point.html and team_participation.html) that I wanted to copy in the widgets/status/score folder. However, simply adding a new group_point.html template in the same place didn't auto-magically show up. There is also no status.score widget registered through the Makahiki interface. Instead, these templates appear to be controlled indirectly through a separate scoreboard app. Looking through scoreboard's template was a bit of a mystery, however, since it makes no explicit reference back to the status.score templates.

The listed Makahiki widgets (front right) and corresponding file structure (back left).

At this point, it was time to move on from this project to bigger and better things. Here is a shot of my successful widgets currently on the Profile page:

And these are available within Makahiki to be added to any page: