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By robertDouglass on
With less than a week to go before the end of Summer of Code 2006, most of the results are in and ready for testing! This year we are seeing an exceptionally high completion rate. At the mid-term evaluation, every project was deemed likely to finish, and now it seems that most will finish ahead of time and with excellent results.
Here is a list of the projects, including links to the various project pages and documentation for how to use what has been done. It is time for Drupalites everywhere to now dig in and start exploring and testing the amazing work that these students have accomplished this summer. Have fun, and report your experiences back here or in the various specific groups that have been created on the groups.drupal.org site.
Comments
Digg this!
http://digg.com/software/14_Summer_of_Code_2006_projects_ready_to_test
These 14 deserve all the attention they can get. Great work, all!
- Robert Douglass
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My Drupal book: Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB and WordPress
Far Out !!!
Drupal and the Drupal community continue to inspire and amaze me. These projects are great. My favourites are the Ajax Form Creator and the Drupal Manager. In fact, I'm loading up the Drupal Manager right now :-)
Doug
Great! My personal favorites
Great! My personal favorites are the Drupal Manager and definitely the Import / Export API by Jaza. I think both are awesome additions to Drupal and could boost its popularity a lot.
Extraordinary!
Drupal Manager and AJAX form builder look magnificent. Great work! With these additions Drupal is continuing to build on its lead as the best free CMS.
Jonathan Pichot
Congrats!!! Looking forward to the new modules
The many new modules are very much appreciated. Good work and congrats to BOTH the code contributors and their mentors!
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
The content recommendation
The content recommendation engine and the social networking analysis tool are my favorite ones. Gotta test them soon :)
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e! Science News
LOVE TO HEAR IT!
Please come test the Content Recommendation Engine!
You really might be surprised on what it adds to your site
Surprised? I've basically
Surprised? I've basically been waiting for it so I can build a site around it :) Just can't wait. Right now im at the AIDS 2006 conference so I cant really work on it, but i'll do as soon as i can ;)
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e! Science News
Big-up!
Been watching with envy from afar - Props to you all... and Google!
Wouldn't like to say which are my faves (I've not had the opportunity to try them all yet), they each sound awesome in their own right.
I will say though, for the Drupal Manager, I cannot get past the "Loading Drupal Manager" screen (on the authors demonstration site).
Related to above issue (and as an afterthought), I'll just end by saying this (as this thread will largely be read by other developers I daresay): When comparing the successful apps over the years (you know, the likes of the big names like, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash Cubase (music) blah blah...), the single one thing they all have in common, is a comprehensive help/maual.
Without forking this thread (and exercising excessive rhetoric), it's by no means NOT an accident that their popularity is largely tied-in to this single important component... sorely lacking in open source and sorely lacking in a lot of modules (on Drupal generally).
No one knows the software better than the originators; it's a mistake to assume users do too, no matter what their level of proficiency.
Mike
Let's hope
Let's hope for an Autumn of Docs ;p
Anyone interested in assisting with the AoD, subscribe to the documentation list & start posting in the handbook.
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The Manual | Troubleshooting FAQ | Tips for posting | How to report a security issue.
Excellent comments. However...
Excellent comments posted above. However, as Drupal is open source, the developers are not necessarily writing code for other folks. Often, a module comes into existence because a developer or a company using Drupal has an itch of some sort. They write the code to satisfy a need they have and then, being good community members, contribute the module back to the Drupal community.
Wouldn't it be nice if each core and contributed module had an excellent and comprehensive help/maual to go along with it? Absolutely! But realistically, we must accept that fact that it is all, in the end, open source, and that not all core and contributed modules will have the desired documentation. After all, there isn't a "customer" to please, a "customer" that is going to hand over cash for a product or service.
So, if someone likes and uses a particular core and/or contributed module quite a bit, he/she should see to it, as a contribution back to the community, that the "Handbook" (as we refer to the help/manual here on drupal.org), if pages for that particular core/contributed module even exist, is in fact "comprehensive."
I would encourage some of the companies that sell Drupal related products and services (hosting, particularly) to develop comprehensive "Handbook" entries for their customers and to then, in turn, contribute those entries back to the Handbooks section here on drupal.org.
Thanks for the excellent comments in this regard and let's keep encouraging everyone to contribute back to the Drupal community in some way, whether it be by answering posts to questions/issues on the forums, improving/contributing to the "Handbooks", and/or making periodic financial contributions to worthy projects.
Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA
President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
Absolutely correct
We encouraged the students to write with good coding style and to document their work as it progressed. Some are naturally talented at this (Jeremy Epstein, for example). Others produced less documentation. I'm hoping that all of our students will want their modules to have a long and happy life, and that they will continue to develop them even now that Summer of Code has ended. As you pointed out, good documentation is a key ingredient to getting people to use your code, and getting other people to use your code should be a big priority for any developer. So your comments are right in line and will hopefully inspire more documentation writing.
On a side note, if you, the reader of this comment, are interested in making a meaningful contribution to Drupal but you aren't able to code, helping to document a module is a great way to do this. If you're looking at the above list of cool projects and thinking "I'd love to use this but there just aren't any instructions", please consider contacting these students and offering to help document their work. It would make a great team, you and them; you can ask them all the questions in the world about how their code works, effectively becoming an expert for that particular module, and in the end you'll be ready to make an important improvement in the project by passing your knowledge on to others.
- Robert Douglass
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My Drupal book: Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB and WordPress
round of applause from Dublin
Hey Robert...
Great work (yet again)...looking forward to testing some of those missives.
Dub
Currently in Switzerland working as an Application Developer with UBS Investment Bank...using Drupal 7 and lots of swiss chocolate