It's been another week since my last update and I've made some decent progress in getting the Navigation implemented and tested.

In the past week, I've had a bit more time than usual which has allowed me to implement the bits that I mentioned at the end of my last post:

• Implement Navigation on Post Page
• Include "My Subscriptions" within the navigation (it currently appears underneath)
• Fine Tune the Design

Navigation on Post Page

As you can see in the screenshot above, I've been able to implement the Navigation in a Post view.

This presented an interesting challenge.

An individual post doesn't provide any "Location context". A post can be accessed from pretty much anywhere in the site - All Posts, My Friends, My Subscriptions, The Various Profile Pages, etc. - so what should the navigation highlight? Simply "Explore"? That didn't feel right.

So the best solution that I could come up with, was to maintain the referring page navigation. So if you're opening a post from your "My Friends" feed, that remains highlighted. This feels correct and appropriate and presented an implementation challenge...

I initially tried to find the referrer which isn't available in the browser (for privacy reasons) by looking in the react-redux store. By default, this works like the browser and whilst goBack will take you to the previous page, I want the URL rather than being automatically redirected. The next option is to install the react-redux-dom pacakge but this created compatibility issues with NodeJS 10 so I shied away from that option.

Eventually, I settled upon manually recording the "previousUrl" in the Redux Store - specifically within the AppReducer. The downside with this approach is that the "previousUrl" is lost when the page is refreshed. An irritation that I'd like to overcome and perhaps by exploring how night mode works, I could overcome this (although nightmode appears to be boolean).

My Subscriptions within Navigation

I was able to tweak the existing "Topics" component to output slightly different HTML that fits with the navigation.

Other than tweaks to some classes, very little else needed changing with this component and the next challenge is to strip out unnecessary data retrieval and processing on the component's parent pages. I've not done this yet because I wanted to get things working first so tidying up needs to go on my next to-do list.

Fine Tune Design

I've played with the spacing a little bit and been fixing plenty of bugs.

Test, Test, Test, Test, etc...

A big thank you to everybody who's helped test so far and for the feedback. I was delighted when @michelangelo3 fed back:

I felt right "at home" despite the changed navigation.

It's really important to me that the navigation doesn't feel alien to existing users and also feels intuitive to new users.

To continue alpha testing, I've uploaded the latest version of my work to the following URL:

https://condenser-web-r64jisicxa-od.a.run.app/

Please visit it, have a play and let me know what you think.

To-do List

• Try to retain "previousUrl" state upon page refresh
• Tidy up Parent Components (which refer to Topics)
• Update Right Sidebar

I've been brief again so please ask if you'd like more detail on anything.