Brian Hines

I worked on a good bit of stuff in this round of updates. There's still a rather large functionality addition to make. It requires some internal reorganization and changes to data models so I'm taking my time and doing a little research. Rushing in is not an option and that's okay. The items that I did complete are still pretty useful.

Home Page

The home page received a couple changes. Most notable of these is a section showing the last ten lunch places we picked. The goal here was to make this information very obvious. I see this helping in two ways. For the unadventurous, it presents an easy way to pick one of the recent places again. For everyone else, hopefully, it will spark interest in selecting something different.

These recent selections are displayed differently on the home page when there's an active lunch pick. In that case, I hid the links for making this the day's lunch pick. There was also a change made to the cancel this pick button. I swapped it out for a something smaller in the upper right corner of the daily pick area. It still works the same way.

Random Pick

This option is now disabled when there is an active lunch selection. This resolves a bug where a user could click the button and it would swap out the daily lunch pick on all active orders. Ultimately, no information was lost but it was still annoying to fix when it happened.

Website Button

In the previous update, a link to restaurant's website was moved into a larger button on the home page. In this update, I also added this option on the lunch order page in case anyone needs it.

Fax Forms

Restaurants that require fax forms for ordering present an interesting dilemma when trying to move to a paperless process. At the moment, there's not a perfect solution for this problem. Luckily, there are not many places that need this special consideration either. That said, there are improvements for handling this situation included here.

On the restaurant model, there is now a field for tracking whether a fax form is required. When adding a new place to the system, simply check this box. By default, it will not be checked.

When the "Requires special fax form?" option is enabled, a message is displayed on that entry on the restaurant list page. Hopefully this serves as a reminder to anyone making the pick that they need to go find a copy of the form to distribute.

When the "Requires special fax form?" option is enabled, another message is displayed on the lunch order page. If you see this, you need to go find the fax form. Welcome to the 20th century. Please accept my apologies in advance. It doesn't have to be like this, but unfortunately, that's out of my hands.