News

Moved to a new hosting platform DigitalOcean

Due to the high cost of AWS, I have moved the site to DigitalOcean, and I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get the site up and running compared to AWS. And it seems to be quicker too. I ended up spending more time learning AWS infrastructure than working on the website, so it was not a good solution for me.

Supermarket demo site removed. One demo site is enough for now

• Fixed calendar bug for end of year
• Worked on smoothing out background tasks
• Added security settings for production
• Unassigned shifts will now look 14 days into the future
• Implemented S3 bucket for storing user uploaded images
• Fixed audit view formatting issues
• Added chart text data and implemented text color change depending on theme

Mostly allocation and UI tweaks

• Added many to many data to be views in a detail view
• Made multi-select fields consistent over the forms
• Added shift time category distribution rule
• Customer registration fix
• Created a more complex, long term control test

Add Shift Time Category distribution rule

• Add filters for allocation rules
• Fix allocation bugs
• Fix staff registration error
• Added demo login environment var
• Fix Shift giveaways and unassigned shifts on home page
• Reworked settings backend
• Fixed forms to be consistent in selection fields
• Added many to many functionality in detail views

Rebranded from Pyrota to Pyrotas. So we could get the .com domain!

• Added bulk loading functionality to see allocation over a long period of time. This includes weekday and weekend rosters
• Adjusted some reports to look consistent
• Added shift assignments summary report
• Implemented better sorting on staff view
• Added theme selector

We now have a minimum viable product!

• Lots of fixes, tweaks and style changes
• Reworked allocation with regard to staff skills
• Implemented priority to staff requirements
• Added capability to bulk add and process rosters to check long term allocation results

Now able to be deployed to Amazon Web Services

Everything is now on AWS. The name servers, the app, the database and the background tasks

This means you can now pick data centres local to your region

Split shifts

You can now configure split week shifts for rosters. For example you can assign shifts for a subset of staff from Mon-Wed, and another subset of staff from Thu-Sat, where all staff share Sunday

Now able to be deployed to Heroku

Not currently using, but have verified the correct packages are included, and it works

Incorporated chart.js

3rd party javacript library for some chart displays now included

Added Messaging

Admin can now compose a message with a start and end date which will display an alert on the landing page

• Code base for all database creation scripts now share the same code
• Static and media files are now handled by the nginx server instead of Django
• Styling and bug fixes

Mostly fixes and implemented allocation rules and sets

• Fix shift allocation bug
• Completed allocation from shift preferences
• Removed timezones form and implemented pytz timezones, which you can pick when creating a location
• Fix my weekly shifts being truncated
• Fix export files being placed in the wrong folder on linux
• Fix query to get shifts per user
• Changed weight scoring to only calculate up to the current day as apposed to calculating all future shifts
• Implemented 3 allocation rules. Min % of weekend work, Max hours per week and max shifts per week
• Optimized all forms and reports database queries
• Added message model to database
• Fix to keep footer at bottom of page

• Added section or departments to roster definitions
• Lots of housekeeping type tasks
• All forms now maintain sort order when using pagination buttons
• Added basic SEO
• The basis of a generic, weighted shift allocation engine has now been coded (see below)
• Refactoring of User, Staff and Profile records
• Implementation of bootstrap 5 and its bootswatch themes. These are the last 2 themes available to pick
• A lot of improvements on the Weighting Report to help with testing
• Various bug fixes

Allocation of Shifts

• Allocation now takes Staff leave, Shift preferences and Public holidays into account
• Staff Categories are also factored into allocation depending on their set priority
• The weight scoring task has been rewritten to be far more flexible. This is a task run on the server to calculate staff scores to predict shift allocation. Now it can be executed as little or as often as required
• Allocation will soon be moved to a thread, as it is now approaching a very time consuming process to run in real-time
• Weighting to be made user configuratble

• Added a csv export function for weekly assignment hours. This is the first of a group of import/export functions
• Added ability to edit shifts in a Roster. This works up until the point the roster is allocated, at which time the feature will be locked
• Added a 2nd demo website to demonstrate how to setup a roster for a different business type, in this case, a supermarket

Major Change

Added multi-shift per day per Roster functionality

Summary of other changes

• Fixed up help text to be consistent
• Added Sections, which is a Department or zone within a location
• Numerous typo changes