The Nansen Wintercamp - Day 3

April 7, 2014

Breakfast was served at 9 today. After one and half days the Wintercamp had found it's pace. The atmosphere at Koppars is amazing, the historic timber main building with it large, roubust kitchen easily hosts 15 people and is the main hub for the activities. This is where we hangout, cook, eat, play games, work, meet and 3D print stuff. The main building is surrounded by a few smaller but equally rustic, yet rugged buildings, and this is where we sleep, breakout for smaller work sessions, and retreat for some relaxation.

Koppars main building.

"Längan" where the majority of us slept in bunk beds.

The view from the main building overlooking river "Ljusnan".

The sauna by the river

Today some of the groups have completed the majority of their main tasks and either went on to refine them or started other minor tasks. A few of the groups reorganized with new members to solve specific tasks.

Group "Sean, Erik and Rudde" are done with the integration of the bolierplate and the TFS/preview server so they split up to join the other groups.

Sean and Erik

Sean started writing a console application for checking in and comitting code to the TFS. After a while, he realised that it added almost no value at all, so it was all shelved.

Instead, he and Erik helped Rob and Arnold with the Commerce integration and installer. Sean also joined the project management team to translate copy and cases for the Nansen site.

Ron & Arnold

Today was a very busy day to get the bulk of the Commerce installation process ready for initial tests. There were a few hurdles to get over;

- making sure the scripts all execute smoothly.
- lots of testing and fixing to improve the performance of the scripts.
- dealing with some of the idiosyncrasies of powershell within visual studio.

Basically the result of the day was getting the six Power Shell scripts that automates the Commerce installer ready. Current state of it is that it is a half manual installer. Rob and Arnold is aiming for a demo tomorrow.

Andreas O, Giovanni, Andreas N

Johan and Andreas O has been cleaning up the Encore framework to make it tidier for the wireframe integration.

Johan focused a lot on the overall performance of the boilerplate. He has been reducing a lot of http-request and enhanced performance in the Boilerplate.

Giovanni has been working on the new 12 col grid inspired by the Foundation and Twitter bootstrap to see how they have solved a lot of their challenges. Twitter Booststrap and Foundation have been merged to fit the Boilerplate naming convention and Giovanni also added some extra stuff that the two did not have (what).

The change to the 12 col grid also necessitated a rewrite of a lot of class names and ids, so those have been changed and will be merged.

The base grid system is going to be updated with a more flexible and competent grid system for more complex designs. This facilitated a good discussion about the inability of EpiServers "blocks" functionality to adapt to anything but the 12 column grid system.

Andreas N has also updated all of the documentation on GitHub for this new version.

Andreas O has been working on the modul.js developing it further and also added/updated the documentation.

Yaaayyy, lunch!

Each day we had different people responsible for the lunch and dinner.

Here is Tove finishing up today's chicken pesto.

Maria, Tove, Lotta, Rober, Andreas C, and Rudde

Since yesterday's conclusion was that a third party software/service would not give us any head start in the making of the drag-n-drop interface, we decided to ask the project managers to join us to discuss the wireframe tool from a UX/client perspective; is there anything we can add, remove or improve to make it a better tool for us and the client understanding the site/project it's used for? These are some of the features we discussed:

- Remove the ability for clients to edit/add comments to the wireframes.
- Lay low on the Trello/Jira integration. Use annotations for the high level descriptions of the wireframes and then refer and link to Jira or Trello for more in depth documentation and requirements.
- Create sitemap functionality where the outcome of IA or a content audit can live.
- Create some kind of "Ready for approval" functionality. Do not duplicate functionality that is already in Jira or Trello.