Community update

Hi everyone,

I just want to give a brief update on what is going on with Parf Edhellen.

At the moment, I am in the process of reengineering the frontend application, which is essentially the things you see and interact with on the website. The new solution will appear the same as today, but the new solution will be more rigorously tested and perform better. Unfortunately, there is a lot to reengineer, and to date, I have made 41 code changes on a separate code branch. Currently, the search and dictionary view is operational. Next, I will implement flashcards, phrases, and discussions (in that order).

Once the transition is done, I will be moving forward with some relatively "big" changes related to neologisms and community-curated dictionaries, related to the suggestions from the What is your opinion on neologisms? thread. That will be fun - looking forward to it!

I will regularly give brief updates here to update you on my progress.

Regards,

Aldaleon

Hey Aldaleon,

Glad to hear about all the progress you've made so far! Looking forward to the "new solution" - the sooner you finish the better, of course; but do take your time.

Also, hoping to see the "big changes" to be made, especially regarding Neologisms. Seems interesting!

Cheers,

Hadron

When you get around to implementing neologisms, it would be helpful to provide a list somewhere that shows neologisms by order of creation, to support the review process. I’ve done something similar in Eldamo and found it very helpful.

eldamo.org

While we are wishing for community features ... it might be nice to have an RSS feed or more comprehensive email notification system for the Discussion threads on Parf Edhellen. When G+ goes down, this site might become the most active forum for Elvish discussions.

For example, right now you can only subscribe to individual threads. You might allow automatic subscription to all new threads.

Hi everyone,

I would like to give a quick progress update. I am currently completely re-engineering phrases as part of the transition. The changes are comprehensive and have taken far longer than I had initially anticipated, but they are going to be truly great. The new version will be able to differentiate between sentences and provide translations inline. Fortunately, the Phrase feature is soon done, whereupon I will look at Discuss.

If you have any ideas on how I can improve the community, please let me know. As per Paul's suggestion, I will implement RSS and JSON feed as part of the new version.

The ts branch is now 67 commits ahead of the main production branch.

Kindly,

Aldaleon

Hi everyone,

I have just returned from a two week vacation abroad. So with my return, my work continues. The current status of the project is this:

I am still working on Phrases. It is the single-most complicated feature on this website, and I am making it better. At this point, all basic functionality has been implemented, but it needs to be optimized for devices, and there are still a few minor bugs I need to fix.

Next, I will be tackling Discuss and Flashcards in that order. Neither of the two are as complex as the Glossary and Phrases.

Thanks,

Aldaleon

Hello everyone!

I would like to give a short update on what I am presently working on. Some of you may have noticed that my activity lately in the community and on our Twitter account has been limited. The reason for this is honestly that my work on the next version of Parf Edhellen is still ongoing. It turned out to be way more work than I had initially anticipated, mostly because I keep figuring out "great" new features as I go along.

The latest of these features is what I call (internally) for discussion groups. These groups are essentially categorizations of related discussions to help you more easily find content that interest you. These groups are presently configured by an administrator, and I have decided to go with the following at launch:

• Profiles: Discussions and comments on peoples' profiles.
• Contributions: Feedback on approved, rejected and pending contributions.
• Glossary: Discussions about glosses in the dictionary, including approved contributions to the glossary.
• Phrases: Discussions about phrases composed by Tolkien and the community.
• Miscellaneous & more: Discussions about everything else, with no clear association to a specific part of the dictionary.

Some of these groups will be entity locked, meaning that if you comment on, for an example, a gloss, your comment will create a discussion thread (or contribute to existing discussion thread) within the Glossary discussion group. This will hopefully make the discuss section, which I think is a very important part of our community, easier to navigate.

Let me know if there is a group you would like me to add (or remove for that matter - let's debate!)

So where am I at currently? Well, with the workload growing exponentially (almost, anyway...) I am still working on discuss. The following parts remain:

• create /edit / delete posts
• finalize styling of the timeline on peoples' profiles
• adjust API and system event handlers to respect discussion groups

I expect all of these things will probably be done within the next two weeks.

Concurrently, I have discovered that the contribution functions does not work very well. They will be up next, probably first glosses and thereafter phrases.

Finally, I just want to let you know that I am always looking for github.com contributors. Even something so small as a single React component would be immensely useful, so do not hesitate to reach out if you think you can assist.

With that, I thank you as always for visiting and contributing to Parf Edhellen whether it be with discussions, inquiries, or simply browsing the dictionary and phrases.

Thank you,

Aldaleon

Hello everyone,

I think it is time for another update. Today, a few minutes ago, I committed the 100th change since I embarked on the mission to re-engineer the front-end. The discuss feature is still the subject of my current implementation work, and I have quite a bit of work still ahead of me.

Remaining components are: create, edit and delete posts, and support commenting on arbitrary elements on the website.

Work continues... Thank you for your patience.

Aldaleon

Hi everyone,

Sorry update here on my progress. After a break, I am at it again. Create posts to existing threads is more or less done. I will add the ability to create threads next. Lastly editing and removal of posts.

I think that I may update the website when that is done and then incrementally add support for editing and creating glosses and texts.

For those of you who do not know what is going on: I am working on a great set of feature and platform updates for the website. It does take an inordinate amount of time, but it is going to be great when it is done. I am trying to check back once every month to give an update on the progress.

Hi everyone,

I am happy to announce that I have completed the Discuss portion and added RSS and JSON feed support to the service. Next step is to integrate the feeds with the user interface, and polish all aspects of the public website. I am excited, as I have finally finished the the external website functionally!

Moving on to the internal website, I will need to reengineer the Gloss and Phrase forms. This is a good thing, as they have been somewhat buggy for some of our members.

You can track my progress in the ts branch on Github. The branch is 140 commits ahead of our production branch - whew!

Thanks again for your patience,

Aldaleon