History

The new monbusho.org

Last updated: as of revision 285.

Texts, announcements, release notes

Release notes

Major improvements

Django admin

  • All database objects are now easy to edit through the Django admin. http://django.monbusho.org/admin/
    • For your convenience there is a link to this from the Admin menu when you are logged in on monbusho.org
  • The Django Admin is the new interface for all administrative tasks, such as:
    • Accept and Reject new scholars
    • Add donations
    • Add sponsors
    • Add news on the front page
    • Edit scholars
    • Reset passwords

Text editing

All site texts are in Django template files, which should be relatively easy to understand and play with. The files are in:

~/django.monbusho.org/bzr/monbusho/templates/

Most of the page texts are in:

~/django.monbusho.org/bzr/monbusho/templates/home/

The email texts are in:

~/django.monbusho.org/bzr/monbusho/templates/email/

Old features reborn

Scholar profile improvements

  • Picture uploading is back
  • Many new fields for social networking info: blog url, homepage url, twitter
  • Blank fields are not shown, looks cleaner this way

Google AdSense

Re-enabled Google AdSense, but on public pages only. You can edit in the template file adsense.html

Sponsors

Now you can edit the sponsors on Django admin. You can also monitor how many times they get clicked, and from what IP addresses, also on Django admin.

Feedback database

In addition to sending emails, the feedback form entries are also stored in database, so you can see the full history on Django admin.

Reset password for users

  • Users should be able to reset their own passwords themselves most of the time
  • When needed, you can reset the password of users on Django admin
    1. In the Admin menu click on Manage Scholars
    2. Find the user, tick the checkbox next to the user
    3. From the Actions pulldown at the top of the page select Reset password and click OK

Admin menu

Admins get a hot red admin menu when logged in, with convenient links to management tasks and other goodies.

Redmine

Heck, this project management site itself is a great improvement!

Completely new features

News section on front page

There is a "site news" section on the front page, which you can edit on Django admin.

Tweets on front page

Tweets matching #monbusho or #monbukagakusho will be shown on the front page. Unfortunately, the search API of Twitter shows only the results matching for the last few days, older tweets will not show up. And, as it turns out, not a lot of people use these hash tags anyway, so it would be better to change the search string. What should it be?...

Social networking buttons

Added Facebook's 'Like' button, Google +1 button, but on public pages only.

New content

  • Rewrote some texts, especially the texts on sign-up, in an attempt to deter people who simply misunderstand who we are.
  • Added new page with general but actually very useful scholarship info for people who find our site by accident looking for the scholarship.
  • Added new page with disaster info and tips.
  • Added a Polls page in the Members section, for various opinion polls, especially for new features on the site.

Improved security

  • Removed the admin email address from all public content, as a small measure to keep out the spam.
  • Passwords chosen by users are never sent in emails. Only generated passwords are sent in emails.
  • Significantly improved the security of the security question/answer
    • The answer is stored encrypted, as it is private information
    • The question is stored encoded to make it less visible in case it might contain private information.
  • The most sensitive or tricky features are unit-tested.
    • In general it is very easy to unit test things in Django, so we should be much less bug-prone.

Polls

Members can now post their polls in the Members section. You can create a poll easily using Google Docs, and then post the link to the poll on monbusho.org

Changed features

Some things work differently in the new version.

  • Search scholar database
    • The user interface is much cleaner
    • Always at most the first N results are shown

Features NOT migrated

  • New users cannot edit their sign-up form after sending
  • Some meibo search features
    • No 'Condition type' parameter (logic uses AND)
    • No 'Ordering depth' parameter (logic uses 1)
  • I did not migrate the BBS, but maybe we should add it later. I created a poll for it here: http://django.monbusho.org/home/members/