Course Testimonials #46

nikhen-s · 2025-07-01T10:09:47Z

Main Changes

Added Testimonials Tab and Table
Added courses and testimonials backend

Work in progress

…al + Notifications to users depending on testimonial result

…ual testimonial approvals

…ials table

yutotakano

Thanks for the awesome feature! There are several points I'd like to request changes or comments on, so I'd appreciate it if you could iterate on it when you have the time.

Major points are:

I would prefer not to expose the category ID to the frontend. It's generally not good practice to expose raw DB IDs and slugs are perfectly equivalent for all the use cases of this PR
Notification emails are broken as it currently stands
Every user can currently see every testimonial, including rejected ones by someone else (in the network request)
Some React and SQL optimizations and code style suggestions; a lot of the code feels very imperative (React is mostly suited for functional programming) and triggers unnecessary re-renders
Mantine Datatable doesn't feel necessary

I'm aware there are lot of things I've left comments on... apologies! I'll be honest a lot of the code is currently a little messy and I wouldn't want that merged in just yet. It shouldn't be very hard to fix though!

If you don't have time because of your job etc, then don't worry; feel free to say and someone else (maybe me) can pick it up :)

yutotakano · 2025-09-13T12:54:01Z

backend/categories/models.py



 class Category(models.Model):
+    id = models.AutoField(primary_key=True)


The slug acts as the user-friendly unique ID for categories, and I'd prefer not to send raw database IDs to the frontend since it's not good practice. This PR looks like it can be entirely written with slugs, so could we do that?

yutotakano · 2025-09-13T12:55:55Z

backend/categories/views.py

 from util import response, func_cache


+@response.request_get()


If we remove category_id from this endpoint, then the result is fairly similar to list_categories right below. Instead of creating a duplicate endpoint, it would be shorter to merge the two, basically adding an optional query parameter to list_categories, like files.betterinformatics.com/api/categories/list/?include_euclid_codes=true.

yutotakano · 2025-09-13T12:59:21Z

backend/categories/views.py

+            "category_id": cat.id,
+            "displayname": cat.displayname,
+            "slug": cat.slug,
+            "euclid_codes": [euclidcode.code for euclidcode in cat.euclid_codes.all()]


This line is likely going to be pretty slow, since we're doing one DB query for every row returned from Category.objects.all().

I would suggest to use

categories = Category.objects.prefetch_related("euclid_codes") [...]

which under the hood will do an SQL JOIN, so everything is fetched in one query.

yutotakano · 2025-09-13T12:59:41Z

backend/categories/views.py

    categories = Category.objects.select_related("meta").order_by("displayname").all()
    res = [
        {
+            "category_id": cat.id,


I suggest removing this in favour of slug.

yutotakano · 2025-09-13T12:59:52Z

backend/categories/views.py


 def get_category_data(request, cat):
    res = {
+        "category_id": cat.id,


yutotakano · 2025-09-13T15:48:13Z

frontend/package.json

-    "clsx": "^2.1.0",
+    "clsx": "^2.1.1",
    "date-fns": "^3.3.0",
+    "dayjs": "^1.11.13",


We already have date-fns, what is the dayjs dependency used for and can we replace it with date-fns?

yutotakano · 2025-09-13T15:49:07Z

frontend/package.json

    "@mantine/form": "^8.1.2",
-    "@mantine/hooks": "^8.0.0",
-    "@tabler/icons-react": "^3.0.0",
+    "@mantine/hooks": "^8.1.2",


The various Mantine package versions don't appear to be consistent with each other. This is bad, since Mantine packages are released in tandem and have compatibility issues if you combine multiple versions. If we're sticking to 8.2.1, everything should be 8.2.1.

But honestly, if we aren't relying on anything new, sticking with ^8.0.0 would be better. This is because the upstream repository (Community-Solutions at ETH) uses ^8.0.0 and it would make maintenance easier if they were aligned.

yutotakano · 2025-09-13T15:53:13Z

frontend/package.json

    "jwt-decode": "^4.0.0",
    "katex": "^0.16.9",
    "lodash-es": "^4.17.21",
+    "mantine-datatable": "^8.2.0",


I'm not 100% convinced that we need mantine-datatable for the testimonials list.

None of the columns except "number of testimonials" and "course name" really need sorting, so it's probably more lightweight to implement it on our own. It's not a particularly large and heavy table either, since there are only O(category_count) number of rows, not O(testimonial_count) rows. Normal Mantine table should be able to cope perfectly fine with such amount.

What do you think?

yutotakano · 2025-09-13T15:54:25Z

frontend/src/pages/testimonials-page.tsx

+
+        </Modal>
+
+        <Card withBorder={true} radius="md" p={"lg"} style={{


p="lg" is conflicting with "padding: 8px" right below. Please be consistent with the styling, and prefer the JSX props approach where possible. If complex inline styles are needed, I suggest moving them into CSS modules.

yutotakano · 2025-09-13T16:00:14Z

backend/notifications/models.py

    NEW_COMMENT_TO_COMMENT = 2
    NEW_ANSWER_TO_ANSWER = 3
    NEW_COMMENT_TO_DOCUMENT = 4
+    UPDATE_TO_TESTIMONIAL_APPROVAL_STATUS = 5


I think it's worth creating a custom DB migration to enable this setting for everyone by default. In auth_backend.py I see you've edited the default setting for new users, but existing users (which there are over a thousand on BI) will not default to receiving notifications.

The migration should create a NotificationSetting with UPDATE_TO_TESTIMONIAL_APPROVAL_STATUS for every existing user.

It might be worth having a reverse migration too, but I'm not sure what the correct semantics should be. Maybe delete every row that has UPDATE_TO_TESTIMONIAL_APPROVAL_STATUS?

nikhen-s · 2025-09-15T15:02:00Z

Thanks for the detailed review @yutotakano ! No worries at all, I'm happy to make the changes requested, and can slowly do it over the next week or two.

yutotakano · 2025-09-15T15:04:44Z

Awesome!! If you have thoughts or disagree with any of my comments during development, let me know. Maybe your ideas are better :)

nikhen-s added 11 commits July 1, 2025 11:03

Added testimonials tab and basic table

89b96bb

Changed react table library

4d8516d

Fixed DataTable UI

e458800

Fix Layout of Add Testimonial Modal

068cf42

Add Testimonial Backend and Frontend working

8ce566d

feat: AI toxicity Testimonial Check + Admin View to Approve Testimoni…

6f51715

…al + Notifications to users depending on testimonial result

Removed AI check for testimonials + Added approval flag in db for man…

bc12174

…ual testimonial approvals

Fixed Admin View of Testimonials + Keep rejected testimonials in db

6e0b0ab

Merged with master

e77e8c1

Fixed Django Models to align courses in categories table and testimon…

fcca3ca

…ials table

Connect Categories with Testimonials Backend

2e5f1bc

nikhen-s marked this pull request as ready for review September 13, 2025 11:22

yutotakano self-requested a review September 13, 2025 13:19

yutotakano requested changes Sep 13, 2025

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		class Category(models.Model):
		id = models.AutoField(primary_key=True)

		from util import response, func_cache


		@response.request_get()


		</Modal>

		<Card withBorder={true} radius="md" p={"lg"} style={{

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