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By robertDouglass on
I am very happy to announce that an invitation from Google arrived today asking if Drupal would like to participate in Summer of Code 2006. Drupal's involvement in SoC 2005 was a smashing success bringing code, money and fresh faces to the Drupal project. Being given the opportunity to repeat and build upon last year's experience is a dream.
This year I would like to see more discussion beforehand on the types of projects that would be most beneficial to Drupal for students to work on. We learned last year that about half of the applicants will latch onto ideas that we provide and half will propose exciting ideas that we never thought of. Use this thread to discuss potential projects and I'll organize and pursue the most promising ideas on separate pages later when students begin applying. See below for instructions
Last year also showed that there is never too much support from mentors. I'm not joking when I say I would like to see two mentors per student. Please contact me directly if you would like to be a mentor.
Now is the time to start reaching out to college students who might be considering getting involved in open source development and encouraging them to apply to SoC, and specifically to the Drupal project. Students are encouraged to plan their applications carefully and really invest time and energy into preparing them. The competition will be fierce and an application must really stand out to catch our attention. The rewards, however, are great. Some of the students from last year are now working full time as Drupal programmers and consultants.
Here's a big round of applause and many thanks to Google in advance! Let's make SoC 2006 another important milestone for the Drupal project.
How you can help
There is now a book page for Summer of Code 2006. If you have a project proposal, please take the time to write a detailed description of your project and as much technical specification as you are able to. Post this as a child page to the SoC 2006 page. Leave it in moderation, I'll review and publish it.
This is *not* a free-for-all feature request invitation; these have to be projects that are practical, realistic and interesting for a college student coming to Drupal for the first time. Furthermore, they must have clearly defined deliverables. It must be stated in black and white what the final goal is, and what the terms of success are.
[edit. I have made this page readonly and eventually, comments will be removed and what's worthy will be moved to the book. chx]
Comments
Suggested SoC2006 project: Synchronize books between sites
As described in this post:
"Making selected book(s) available on several sites"
http://drupal.org/node/56538
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( Evaluating the long-term route for Drupal 7.x via BackdropCMS at https://www.CMX.zone )
groupware like calender
how about some groupware like calender features built on top of event.module?
private events, assigning events to users, group planner view, etc.
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http://www.manalaa.net
Private events
We're currently working with some developers to extend OG to do private events, just as an FYI. This will be contributed back to Drupal when it is done. So no need for duplicate efforts, but the rest of that sounds really cool.
Hopefully a more comprehensive post on all that later.
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BuyBlue.org
Oh and...
Also the concept of having calendars for a group and having a site-wide calendar.
We are specifically doing this to support chapters which could have their own calendar and there would also be a "national" calendar.
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BuyBlue.org
Room for a student sub-project?
If there is a sub project that can be clearly defined and accomplished by a student, you would therefore be in a perfect position to describe it and help mentor the student. It is fine to think of SoC projects in terms of supporting ongoing efforts, just as long as it can be clearly delineated. The student has to have a coding goal that they alone are responsible for creating, and their success in the program will be judged by whether or not they can produce the code.
- Robert Douglass
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My Drupal book: Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB and WordPress
E-commerce?
I would suggest a good hard look at the e-commerce functionality in terms of where we are today and where we want to be in the future.
Gordon, would you like to add your comments?
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Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA, Captain - U.S. Marine Corps (Veteran)
President, Wellness Corps, LLC
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Drupal Users and Developers by Geographical Location
http://drupal.org/node/46659
E-Commerce
Well, off the top of my head a small contribution would be to enhance the current google_analytics to take advantage if the ecommerce features for the stats, and also being able to monitor compaines.
I would be happy to mentor any E-Commerce projects that people may come up with.
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Gordon Heydon
Heydon Consulting
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Gordon Heydon
For those interested in participating...
I was one of the SoC students last year and I would be more than happy to field any questions, comments, concerns, etc. that you guys might have prior to getting involved (and afterwards too; depending on your background, there are a couple hurdles you might have to get over as you get started :)).
Feel free to contact me via my contact form!
Good news and all the best
Good news and all the best for this year too. This might have never happened but for your effort.
However, I never really understood what code Soc2005 contributed to drupal. Is there a page that lists the modules?
Chapters and mini-sites
Drupal already is great for multi-siting, but I'd like to see organic groups and taxonomy extended to allow for Chapters within a site and/or mini-sites. Chapters would have their own admins, search, menus, and terms--a site within the site. I've written more extensively on this and will dig that up if anyone is interested.
Also working on this :)
We're also working on this as well, maybe not everything there is to do but a solid start to it.
Target for completion is June-ish 2006 and it'll all be contributed back to Drupal.
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BuyBlue.org
Indeed :)
I'll be making a post to the devel list this weekend detailing these proposed enhancements and asking for feedback from folks in terms of approaches and such.
Chapters and mini-sites
robertDouglass,
First of all, A HUGE THANK YOU for getting SoC 2006 going! You're awesome!
I apologize for not yet having the know-how to post a detailed list of what the current code is, its shortcomings, technical specs, etc., per your request at the top of this page, but I'm hoping my post helps someone get some ideas who can then write things up in a more formalized manner. I'll be happy to elaborate further once I've read the response posts I requested below from jasonwhat and webchick, but I do believe this is an excellent start to writing a detailed description of the project for an aspiring SoC 2006 college student. :)
jasonwhat,
A BIG +1 to what you wrote as setting up chapters is important to the success of my business vision. You wrote:
Yes, I'm interested. If it's a link, please post the link here in response to my post.
Although I think organic groups is an excellent module, I'm just a bit leery of using it due to the fact that I can't use OG and Taxonomy Access Module together at the same time from what Robert Douglass wrote in Chapter 4, page 131 of his excellent book, Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress: (thanks Robert!)
Is there a way around this weakness and, if so, could a SoC 2006 college student could tackle it?
My goal is to eventually have something similar to NSHMBA's chapters, of which I used to be a board member, and thus allowing my web site visitors to easily visit different chapters and join the one they are geographically near to. I prefer not having to deal with a slew of min-sites (and management thereof), but at the same time I want OG and ALSO taxonomy access control but that isn't currently possible due to node-level access control issues.
webchick,
I'm looking forward to reading your post. Please post the link here to your post on the devel list.
Thanks to everyone!
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Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA, Captain - U.S. Marine Corps (Veteran)
President, Wellness Corps, LLC
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Drupal Users and Developers by Geographical Location
http://drupal.org/node/46659
This is pretty much what we are building
This is pretty much what we are building, but a little more robust than the way it is done there.
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BuyBlue.org
New thread?
Webchick, let us know on this thread when your proposed enhancements are up and we can start a new thread on that over there. I'll repost my in-depth thoughts on such a module based on your proposal, and it definitely seems like there is big interest in this from others.
Dedicated thread would be a good idea
A dedicated thread would probably be a good idea. But just to clarify what is going on, we're paying for all of this work to be done and we have a pretty well defined scope for it. Once that work is done it will all be contributed back - hopefully June/July 2006 timeframe.
The discussion would be useful to determine if there are ways to do things that will help out other projects or allow for better integration. What we probably wouldn't entertain is some kind of design change that results in significantly more hours because as I said there is a defined budget for this. But if it is something small that would greatly help other efforts that might be ok.
It'll also be useful in letting people know what is being worked on so they can start parallel efforts for other add ons.
The solution we've arrived at allows us to implement chapters as we invision them and we did this with a budget in mind as well. That isn't to say it is the complete solution for chapters and I'm sure there are lots of great ideas out there, it is just what we wanted and what we could afford.
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BuyBlue.org
sounds cool, we are waiting impatiently
and don't forget about possibility to run that mini sites from separate domain ;)
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Obin.org - Independent media workshop
We're also working on multiple
We're also working on multiple sections within one install :)
It sounds like in a couple weeks/months, we should get together and compare methodologies.
But, this is off topic for this thread --
/hijack ended
Cheers,
Bill
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
A couple project ideas...
1. This is a nice, messy problem to try and solve ;) http://drupal.org/node/58845
Ideally, a project around this issue would result in a module that auto-generates help_hook text based on Drupal handbook pages. Would require some XML knowledge, some regex kung fu, and probably some other fun stuff.
2. A WYSIWYG form builder which automatically generates FAPI code. Think the VB.NET interface where you drag and drop controls where you want them, set the appropriate properties, enter the code you want to execute on submit, validate, and so on... click a button, and boom. I was thinking of building something like this in XUL which would run in Firefox, but it could also be done in AJAX. This could even go nuts and auto-generate .install files and hook_insert, hook_update, and hook_delete statements based on the fields generated in the form builder.
If CCK really takes off, it might render such a project useless, but you never know. ;)
Oh, and 3. Quiz module!
/me runs and hides :(
Music Module Idea
http://drupal.org/node/58849 - If this would work for summer of code, I'd let someone else have it.
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Bradlis7.com | Churchofchristnet
Forum, Themes and Core Email Module
some feature growth in the Forum module
and Themes, but I doubt we will have access to graphic artist type
Advanced forum module
Advanced forum module is important indeed: i have spend many many hours to modify forum functionality in drupal to mimic some of "normal" features, that phpbb have and it just did not worked. i don't mean that forum.module is crap, because its not phpbb - i mean that communities that i have been trying to bless with the light of the blue drop keeps on winging about standard functions they are use to.
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Obin.org - Independent media workshop
Improved forum
Yea this would be great to have.
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Be Smart, Think Free, Choose OpenSource
Improved Forum
Agreed
Drupal built-in forum needs
Drupal built-in forum needs ALOT of improvement.
There's no question that forum is a big part of many communities. I think a good forum software is one in which there are many features that allow users and groups of users to personalize themselves effectively. For Drupal, it doesn't simply mean improving the forum module per se, but rather improving a group of modules. For example,
+ Taxonomy -- should have the ability to have sticky posts with respect to any given vocabulary. This allows sticky posts exclusively in a selected forum.
+ Taxonomy access to a restricted vocabulary to allow restricted access to selected forums.
+ The profile module should allow user to add avatars, etc.
+ Can users customize their blog's theme? If they can, it'll be great.
+ Additionally, the Drupal forum currently uses the node-comment structure to create forums. Each reply to a node is not a node, but rather a comment to the node. To expand forum's capability, this may need to change. Each reply to a post should be a node.
There's a forum module that doesn't use the node structure, but that really destroy all the good things that go with the node system, including taxonomy.
Various ideas
Ahoy,
Priorities for me, using Drupal on quite a few projects (lots of personal sites for friends, Remix Commons, SpreadKDE, other under-development stuff) are:
- Finish CCK and implement better interfaces to the fields, see e.g. the work being done on the date field.
- Improve tools for collaborative editing, so you get all the basics that fit together nicely: edit locks, revision control, diffs, theming possibilities (e.g. show 'last edited by', show 'page has x revisions'), allow for some revisions to be in moderation so people can work on 'staging' versions of a page without affecting the live version), and probably more. Lots of this already works but not particularly well, the overall effect is messy and incomplete.
- Lots of views integration. Currently it's either not done at all, or incomplete (i.e. there could be more fields, filters & sort criteria, and sometimes improved handlers).
- File uploads with webdav/sftp/scp/etc. Allow people to upload files and then attach them to nodes, since uploading through PHP/Apache is a pile of pants for any remotely large files. Implement in such a way as to make it trivial to integrate with other modules (e.g. upload, image)
- A metadata metamodule, something that puts in place the necessary hooks and can easily be extended to provide rich metadata on files and let Drupal set the data too, e.g. ID3 tags, EXIF data, extra XML in SVGs (such as Creative Commons license info) and so on.
- Provide a geodata module that gives you decent address data beyond the US and Germany, for modules like EventFinder.
These are just some big areas where Drupal either has no implementation, or messy incomplete ones.
The true flat file cache !
helo
What would really rock is an module that could cache website into flat files on the file system. Then contents of that dir could be replicated (via Rsync) among few "publication" servers, as it is with mir cms, that is powering many of indymedia websites.
That kind of set up cane sustain huge traffic with no stress on master server, that could be used only for publication and administration.
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Obin.org - Independent media workshop
Produce an improved survey module...
I think it would be really cool to have a fully-featured survey module with different kinds of question templates, graphic generation capabilities, page-layout features and other things that are commonly available in non-open source services such as SurveyMonkey and others...
I believe this tool would be really important for organizations that want to find out more about their constituencies...
.L.
As per the updated instructions
Please create child pages to the SoC 2006 page:
http://drupal.org/node/add/book/parent/58865
Take the time to really describe the project. This means the motivations, the existing code that is related, the problems with that code, how the new code will solve those problems, etc. A technical roadmap of how to code it would be great, as would mockups of the interface and workflow.
These are great ideas, but if you really want to see them get coded, it will take more work on your part than "I think it would be great if..."
- Robert Douglass
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My Drupal book: Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB and WordPress
Would it be possible to post
Would it be possible to post a couple good project descriptions that were accepted from SoC 2005? Are the proposals written up here the full text of proposals that were accepted last year, or are these write-ups summaries of successful proposals?
If people can look at successful proposals from the past, they will have a clearer idea about the level of specificity required in a good write-up.
Cheers,
Bill
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
Create a "personal website" module...
It would be awesome to have a module that allows users to create their personal web pages with multiple pages, images, etc. within a Drupal site. Ideally, this module should be extremely easy-to-use... an WYSIWYG interface similar to Google Page Creator (pages.google.com) wouldn't be bad at all...
.L.