By robertdouglass on

UPDATE
Our official project ideas can be found here:
http://www.drupal.org/summer_of_code_2005
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Mark Leicester pointed out on the development list that Google is funding open source development by awarding student stipends for their participation in open source projects. I think that Drupal should most definitely put some ideas up - perhaps we'll attract some fresh young talent (as if we have anything else around here ;-)

The link to the Google program is here:
http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html

In order to participate in this program, we need to apply by June 14th. I am volunteering to handle the application process.

What we need until then are the following:

The mentoring organization must do the following:

Create a pool of ideas for students to choose from.
Have a person available to take in student ideas should they not find something that appeals to them.
Have a person available to review the incoming applications marked for that organization and decide who should go forward with the effort.
Have a person to monitor the progress of the students and mentor them as the project goes forward.
Have a person ready to take over for that person in the event they go on vacation, are hit by a bus, etc...
Be able to tell us about the developer, how they worked with the group, if they should be invited back should we do another summer of code, etc..

If you are interested in assisting in one of these roles, or If you have ideas for the student's project, let us know in a comment here.

I'll get the ball rolling by proposing a project:

Multi-site posting module

The multi-site posting module allows a user to specify, from a list of pre configured sites, which external Drupal sites a node is destined for. The module would use the bloggerapi to post copies of the node to those sites.

Each user who has the 'post to external sites' permission would be allowed to configure a list of urls, usernames and passwords. These sites would then become the possible targets of the external posting. Node type would be handled with the bloggerapi 'category' trick, just like when posting via wBloggar or Ecto.

The target sites would, of course, have to have the bloggerapi.module turned on and be able to authenticate the user.

Comments

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

we hope to sign up around 200 developers. We hope the end result will be more open source developers!

200 developers - that's $1,000,000 that Google has set aside for OS development. There's gotta be at least one in it for Drupal!

- Robert Douglass

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http://www.hornroller.com/French_Horn_News
www.robshouse.net

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

Ideally we would submit an application today or tomorrow, but I need at least 2 volunteers to be mentory-type peoples and some more ideas as to what the kid can code.

- Robert Douglass

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http://www.hornroller.com/French_Horn_News
www.robshouse.net

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

An upcoming.org API module that integrates with our event and location modules. It would:

  1. define an upcoming.org event node type
  2. define a venue node
  3. Allow you to import upcoming.org events or venues
  4. Allow you to export (to upcoming.org) events or venues
  5. Implement the complete upcoming.org REST API so that any tools designed to work with upcoming will work with Drupal

I'll be one of the mentors needed to complete this application. We still need another mentor and more ideas!!! C'mon - doesn't anybody else see any value in this?

- Robert Douglass

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http://www.hornroller.com/French_Horn_News
www.robshouse.net

drumm’s picture

drumm
he/him
Location NY, US
commented

Why isn't the event module mentioned?

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

the word "event" was originally supposed to appear between "our" and "and" -- I updated and corrected it.

- Robert Douglass

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http://www.hornroller.com/French_Horn_News
www.robshouse.net

ezheidtmann’s picture

ezheidtmann commented

I am interested as a student. Should I wait to submit an application until Drupal is listed as a mentoring organization, or apply now?

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

There are still nearly two weeks to get it all organized. Are there any projects that you'd find particularly interesting to work on? The other members of the community seem to be short on ideas so far.

- Robert Douglass

-----
http://www.hornroller.com/French_Horn_News
www.robshouse.net

ezheidtmann’s picture

ezheidtmann commented

At my school we have been talking about creating a distribution of Drupal for schools. Most of the schools in my area have beautiful (thanks to external professional designers) but badly organized sites. My goal would be to build on Drupal and create a package that's very easy to use and would serve all the functions a good school website does: events, news, and students' assignments. With a summer and $4500, it could be really spectacular. This might be done in concert with DrupalEd, but I'm not sure exactly where they're heading.

This is just the first idea that came to my head. I will probably do something with schools, whatever I do.

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

One idea might be for you to pair up with chx who has recently finished the proof-of-concept implementation of the quiz module. This will be announced in the coming days, as well as a road-map for the 2nd round of implementation. With a summer and that much money I'm sure that a lot could be done. Perhaps the $500 that Drupal receives could go to the mentor? I'm planning on asking for donations via Donorge (reverse bounty) - if we get Google funding for this project the Drupal $500 could go to the Donorge pool.

Thoughts on this?

- Robert Douglass

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http://www.hornroller.com/French_Horn_News
www.robshouse.net

ezheidtmann’s picture

ezheidtmann commented

I took a hard look at my schedule for this summer, and I have decided I won't be able to do any project through SoC. I will have some time for Drupal, but not enough to take a spot in SoC.

I would love to see someone else take up this project! Schools in general and public schools in particular need your help! :-)

boris mann’s picture

boris mann commented

...wherever you want it to head! I helped set up DrupalED so that there could be a central place to talk about education issues. If you'd like to lead the charge on (it sounds like) highschool-level sites, go for it! Sign up for an account (or use your drupal.org ID) and I'll give you contributor status.

The goal is to develop some descriptions of best practices and ultimately bundled distributions/install profiles of Drupal configured for educational use.

If someone says "education" and "Drupal" in the same sentence, send them over to DrupalED.org.

matthew’s picture

matthew commented

Maybe we could post some of the things that never got done from http://drupal.org/node/12202 ?

Also, I would be very interested in applying if Drupal was an option to work on =]

Best,

Matthew
Have a great day™

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

The deadline is tonight. Start coming up with some ideas and add them to the Summer of Code page here:

http://drupal.org/summer_of_code_2005

Please contact me if you would be interested in becoming a mentor for one of these projects. I'd also like to find out if anyone is interested in reviewing applications or helping students draft thier proposals.

- Robert Douglass

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http://www.hornroller.com/French_Horn_News
www.robshouse.net

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

We're a mentoring organization and I've taken the liberty of promoting the projects page to the front page.

- Robert Douglass

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http://www.hornroller.com/French_Horn_News
www.robshouse.net

venkat-rk’s picture

venkat-rk commented

Multi-site posting module is a great idea. With the improved multi-site support in 4.6, it is probably an idea whose time has come.

I second this.

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

A couple of people have indicated that the publish module makes this idea unnecessary and that the security risks are too great (potential for spammers). Since it was just a spur of the moment idea from me I've removed it for the time being. If anyone is genuinely interested in coding this above the other ideas, and can propose a plan for making it secure and limiting the potential for abuse, I see no reason why it wouldn't be considered.

- Robert Douglass

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http://www.hornroller.com/French_Horn_News
www.robshouse.net

jasonwhat’s picture

jasonwhat commented

One idea for a name was "Sacred Space." I have a particular interest in a version for churches with a few custom modules and a database dump, taxonomy terms, links and a few themes to choose from that allows churches to easily setup a site. I'd be happy to help and mentor in this and have nonprofit already incorporated for such projects.

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

Can you write up your spec as detailed as you can? Post it here and I'll put it on the list of ideas.

- Robert Douglass

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http://www.hornroller.com/French_Horn_News
www.robshouse.net

mhutch’s picture

mhutch commented

I'm interested in writing a Google Sitemap module (idea mentioned here: http://drupal.org/node/24251). Google Sitemap is a new 'protocol' that lets you use xml files to advise search engines which pages on your site to index and how frequently their content changes. It's possible to do it with their Python generator code, but obviously a module integrated into Drupal could do the job much better as it would know more about the content.

Clearly such a module would allow administrators to configure its operation, for example the priority attribute. Maybe some kind of hook so that other modules could take part, plus patches to the most popular modules?

Anyway, I'm willing to take this on as a Summer of Code project. Is this something people will be interested in? I'm going to be away for a few days but I'll write a spec when I get back.

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

And the best part is, you won't even need to work hard to convince the Google folks of the importance of such functionality ;-)

Good luck with your application!

- Robert Douglass

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http://www.hornroller.com/French_Horn_News
www.robshouse.net

drupalglaesser’s picture

drupalglaesser commented

What about a citation module for Drupal? I have never seen anything like Bibtex in any CMS and I think it would come quite handy to have a list of references available while writing and being able to use a simple [cite:GLAESSER04] to put references into ones story / book / post... whatever and in the end have a complete list of references in a references-section of the story. If one uses a Bibtex like format or even bibtexML it would be easier for search engines to extract relevant information like author names etc.