[GSoC proposal] Enhancing Feedback module (D7)

Project Information:

Project Page: http://drupal.org/project/feedback
Name: Manu Chaudhary(manu4543)
Mentor: Alex Weber(alexweber)
Email: manu_talkin@yahoo.com
Skype: manu4543
IRC: manu4543 (#drupal, #drupal-contribute)

Overview:

The goal of this project is to enhance the popular Feedback module which is already used in over 2346 sites. In this project various useful features like visual feedback system and Web Annotation will be added to Feedback module. Screenshots of webpage will be sent to site administrator, similar to the new Google Feedback Tool used in many Google Products like Google+, Blogger.

Description:

Feedback helps site administrators in quality assurance of their pages, contents and theme. But website visitors and users are not expected to be expert in field of web development so the textual feedback provided by them might not be enough for the developer to track down the issue. Imagine if developers get a screen shot of the webpage along with problem area highlighted, then it will be a lot easy for them to understand the exact problem and crack it. But currently Feedback Module lacks these features. In order to overcome these limitations this project will add following awesome features in Feedback Module to make it easy for both site administrators to understand the exact problem and visitors to point out the problem:

• From Website Visitor's perspective:-
  Visual feedback: Users can highlight a problem area, blackout the personal information then Feedback will create a screen shot of webpage and submit it for review.
  Users can add brief notes to the problem areas.
  Users can select the bug category from a drop-down list (prepared by site administrators).
• From Website Administrator's perspective:-
  Along with the feedback message, browser details there will also be a screen shot available.
  Can add/remove options in bug category. This will be displayed in drop-down list while submitting feedback form.
  Can configure email ids to which screenshot along with notes will be sent directly into the Inbox.
  Full control on the color, position and size of feedback button.

End Product of this project will a Feedback module which will serve as a complete feedback solution for Website Developers. It will be very easy for website users to give feedback and bug reports on website in a way never before.

Project schedule:

• May 21 - June 8 (3 weeks)
  Understand the working of Feedback Module
  [Begin to add new features]
  Create new GUI for feedback form
  Implement Highlight and blackout functionality
  Implement add notes feature
• June 9 - July 8 (working module is ready)
  Implement Screenshot functionality
  Improve Report Management for site administrators to show screen shot along with other information submitted by user.
• July 9 - August 13
  Midterm Submission
  Add documentation - How to Give Feedback
  Create GUI for administrator to control various features like add/remove bug category, configure email-ids to which report is to be sent, and color/size/position of feedback button.
• August 14
  Final polishing and testing
  Improve documentation
  Final Improvement in GUI of Feedback module.
• August 24
  Final evaluation deadline

Benefits to the Community:

Certainly these features are very cool and useful. Google is already using this kind of feedback system in their products. There are some commercial solutions available in market like Bugmuncher, Usersnap. But again these don't work in Drupal way. To have all these features in very popular Feedback Module will be very useful for Drupal community.

Implementation:

Main implementation issue is with the screen shot functionality. The screen shot feature can be implemented by either using the html2canvas library or a Java applet. I will go with Java applet because html2canvas library is still under active development and is not very mature. Also Java has very powerful classes like Robot to do these kind of things very easily. It will work as
Robot robot = new Robot();
Rectangle captureSize = new Rectangle(Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getScreenSize());
BufferedImage bufferedImage = robot.createScreenCapture(captureSize);
Then bufferedImage is converted into byte array using
imgToByteArrayConvert(bufferedimage);
Finally it is transferred to server.
More details can be found at :
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3113174/screencapture-using-java-applet
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.3/docs/api/java/awt/Robot.html

Who:

My name is Manu Chaudhary and I'm student from Seth Jai Parkash Mukund Lal Institute of Engineering and Technology studying B.Tech (Computer Science and Engineering - 4th year). I am having 3 plus years of working experience in website design and web development. I had developed a chat system using AJAX as one of my initial projects. I am also interested in Computer Vision and my last semester project was a Face Recognition System with web interface using OpenCV library. I am Open Source Enthusiast and working on something new and cool excites me. I have been understanding the inner working of Drupal and its hook system for last 2 months and now I am pretty much comfortable with it. Also I had figured out, how exactly I am going to successfully complete this project, therefore I’m sure I’m the right man for the job.