Hey, folks! :) The Summer of Code start date is approaching rapidly: let's have a round of introductions from each of the students to talk a little about themselves! Who are you? What's your project, and why is it awesome? Where are you from? What's your major and what school do you go to? How'd you come to choose Drupal as your mentoring organization? What do you like to do for fun? And anything else you care to share. :)
Also, if everyone could make sure they have a picture uploaded for themselves, that'd really help put some faces to names. :)
And Just as a somewhat off-topic heads-up, please try and keep Sunday May 25 (the day before SoC starts) somewhat open; I'm looking into options for us having a big webcast kinda thing for students to talk about their projects, each other, and the community. :) Further updates coming in a subsequent post.
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Introduction: Anshu Prateek, OpenID AX
Hi,
Am Anshu Prateek doing OpenID Attribute Exchange Implementation with drupal. Its being mentored by James Walker (walkah) and James A. Reyero. OpenID has already eased up our registrations on the supported website so much. Attribute Exchange will further ease up the profile creation and maintenance. Everytime you move, you just change your details at one place and voila, all your contacts know where you are! And the fact that its a novel field and all that I can refer to is just some blogs and the specs(and of course my mentors) ! So working on something so new and unexplored is definitely exciting. Hope my work acts as a reference to others who want to implement AX and it serves up the drupal community to its best:)
My final year of engineering is going to start this july. Am doing my major in metallurgical and materials engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli(http://www.nitt.edu) , India. I chose drupal to apply coz of my comfort with php,mysql and my hands on experience of working with our own custom CMS. I had initially proposed OpenID implementation itself but was told its already there. Then walkah suggested me AX implementation, I went ahead and did my research and applied. I had also applied to one more org and I had a conflict. One of the things that help me to choose drupal over the other was the vast community. I always got one or the other person to help me out with whatever prob/doubt I had at that instance.
Ok, other than, I like reading books, blogging, cycling, swimming and walking.
Waiting for my SoC cotton :)
http://groups.drupal.org/node/10902 (project wiki)
http://drupal.org/project/openid_ax
Introduction: Joshua Rogers, PluginManager
Well, my name is Joshua Rogers.
I've dubbed the project that I'm working on PluginManager for lack of a better name. But what does it do? Well, when a person uses it, it should load a list of available themes and modules from Drupal.org and present them to the (super)user. The user can choose which ones they want to install, continue, and PluginManager should retrieve and unpack them to their proper locations.
So, why am I doing this? I've got friends that "just want a website." They don't want it to look like everyone else's, and they might play with the options a little bit, but yet they still have a list of taboo words, such as "tar, ftp, sql." This should allow this group to install new themes and extend the functionality of their sites without throwing them too far out of their comfort zone (and in turn, making Drupal unattractive to them.)
I come from a small mining town (which just had it's hundredth birthday) in Northern Alabama. There isn't any mining going on anymore, so the population has gone down to roughly 900 people, on the other hand, it is a very peaceful and plesant town.
I am a computer science major (who saw that coming) at Jacksonville State University in Jacksonville, Alabama.
I chose Drupal as my mentoring organization for a few reasons. It was the first CMS that I used (though I have tried some others along the way.) But, I guess the real reason is that I enjoyed it the most. Writing modules is very easy, there is a good bit of help available, and it can be tweaked to act as needed for a website. Oh, and it has a big blue teardrop shaped mascot. ;)
When the day is done and it's time for fun I usually get caught playing my guitar, watching some "NCIS" or surfing around the internet looking for silly articles (usually about video games.) Oh and paying for summer classes with the money I'm getting from GSoC... Wait a minute, that last one doesn't sound like fun at all... (the spending part...)
Wiki Page: http://groups.drupal.org/node/10893
Project Page: http://drupal.org/project/PluginManager
Introduction: John Snow, Views as Web Widgets
Hello all,
My name is John Snow. I am a computer engineering major at Utah State University. I am from Taylorsville, Utah (near Salt Lake City). Making websites has been a hobby of mine since I was 13 years old. I chose Drupal because I have been using it for all the websites I've made for myself and for clients in the last year and I love it. No other CMS can touch Drupal!
My project is entitled "Views as Web Widgets". This will allow views to be embedded as widgets in various formats in various places. Some of the formats I'll be focusing on are JavaScript, IFrames, Google Gadgets, and Facebook. It's a very exciting project because it will produce a completely new aspect to the way Drupal sites share information.
I also enjoy skiing, traveling, listening to music, and trying new foods.
Wiki: http://groups.drupal.org/node/10984
Project: http://drupal.org/project/views_as_widgets
Utah Group
If you are interested, come join Drupal's Utah Group (http://groups.drupal.org/utah). We just met last weekend, and I met another Drupal Summer of Code student there.
Russ Creech - Charts Module Improvements
Hello everyone,
I am currently a part time student working towards a degree in Physics. Vance-Granville Community College is where I have taken many of my classes so far, but I will finish my degree at either NC State or Duke University. Central North Carolina, USA, is my home where I have lived most of my life. Some of my many hobbies include computer repair and design, wood burning (pyrography), reading (mostly science or military books), swimming, CAD, photography, and learning how things work.
My project is all about charts; pie charts, bar graphs, plot graphs, point charts, timelines, ... I will be integrating Views and CCK support into Massa's Charts module. There will probably be some new additions to the module too, but they are secondary goals of the project. This project is cool because: everyone loves cool-looking charts; all the chart-creation mechanisms are already in place, but this project will have the end result of their seamless integration with Drupal; the number of possible uses will be expanded with Views and CCK integration; the user interface will simplify chart creation; Drupal will be an even better CMS! Bruno Massa (brmassa) is my mentor and will be a great help with the project.
I chose Drupal as my mentoring organization because it is the best CMS around. I have used many different CMSs, and while most of them have a much more gentle learning curve, Drupal is by far the most flexible, extensible, and customizable of them all. All of the websites I maintain now use Drupal. Plain and simple, it's just the best. And the Drupal community is about the size of a small country, which is a great help in an event like the Summer of Code.
Wiki Page - http://groups.drupal.org/node/11454
Project Page - http://drupal.org/project/charts_soc2008
Craig Jackson - Validation API
I am a student at Salt Lake Community College in Salt Lake, UT USA studying Computer Science. I was an Accounting Major, but I switched to CS as my company moved me from Accounting to redesign their website in Drupal. I have not looked back since. I have been making websites for fun for over 10 years. Many were just websites for myself or friends. I'm not sure if any of them are still online.
My project will be setting up an API for the validation of Drupal, so form fields can be easily assigned a validation process (e.g. email, US Phone, Zip, alphanumeric, etc.). This will help to get rid of module-after-module of new validating criteria, and make it an extensible all-in-one module. Second part (aka: the most exciting part), add AJAX functionality to the form submission process. It will run validation onsubmit, then return errors or finish submission on success without redirecting the user for each submission attempt.
I have been working with Drupal for my projects and my company's website for nearly a year. However, I have never been able to do much contributing back besides forum help and infrequent comments in issues. So, I decided to take on a Summer of Code project to help Drupal with a very effective addition to the repository.
I am a big-time football (soccer) fanatic. My TV is pretty much all football throughout the weekends. BTW, Real Salt Lake plays a few hours from now, so you can expect what I will be doing then. My two favorite hobbies are working on my personal web projects and playing some tunes on my Schecter (guitar). If you happen to visit the old polygamist state of Utah, come jam out with me.
Wiki Page
Project Page
Dario Battista Ghilardi, Simpletest Security Scanner
Hi all!
I'm sorry for the ambiguous title but there isn't enough space , my name is too long! Here is the right name of my project:
Security scanner component for SimpleTest module.
Let's talk about me now:
I live in Alzano Lombardo, a small town near Bergamo that is 50km far from Milano. I'm 22 years old and I'm studying at University of Milano. Specifically I'm following Information Security at the information technology department of Crema (again, 50km from Milano).
You can think that I'm spending my life running in circle around Milano, and you're right damn!
This is my third year of university, in the next months I hope I will take a degree, but first I have to do the thesis. My thesis is:
Security scanner component for SimpleTest module.
Ok Ok, I've already said that, but i'm very excited about this project. I'm going to develop a specific security scanner for Drupal, that means that I will check for vulnerabilities into Drupal installation, like every scanner can do with a crawler, but I will also check for wrong permissions and other type of misconfiguration. Notice that this will not be a way to correct errors, with the scanner you can only check if they exists.
All of you guys say here what you like to do, but I wanna say what I hate because I notice that with this things a person can understand more about me. So I hate television, our prime minister and my english teacher (that's beacause I write english so bad, I hate you!).
But, there is some things that I love, like Guinness, development, science, and soccer (only when I'm a player).
I choose Drupal because I have already worked for a web agency in the past. We had a proprietary cms software that was so insecure and I pass my time working on it improving security and usability. It was a good work but I early understand that I can do more. I can put my knowledge and my strenght on something that others can use, and check =) . That's why I moved myself towards Drupal. And now I'm studying, because it's very full of features and I need to understand more to become a drupal developer. This is a very exciting project, and I'm ready to start!
Tony Narlock, Color.module
I am Tony Narlock and I am a student in the Chicago Suburbs. I'm working on improving the color.module for the next version of Drupal. I've been building web templates since the web 1.0 and want to make sure that having color-enabled themes is easier for theme developers.
I've tried a variety of open source content management systems over the years. When it comes down to customizing a website to your needs, Drupal does the job. Not going to lie, we've had years on the web where PHP-Nuke was the defacto CMS and they all seemed to look the same. With newer CM sytems we're seeing people take the time to customize and sculpt site's to their needs. That must be the most gratifying thing, giving webmasters the tools and having them use them. Contributing to open source is gratifying. When it's a web system like Drupal and helping carve the future of the net, it's even better.
On to color.module, today themes are really limited to certain colors. There are great themes out there with potential to utilize something like color.module yet don't. It's unfair for webmasters because we have so many great drupal themes out there and because of the colors they cannot use them on their sites. We need to make theme development for color themes more intuitive and allow themes with/without color support to be filtered through D.O. downloads.
I came across Drupal after I decided to use it for a school website. I made a pact with myself that with this site I would try to be original as possible by creating a custom theme for it. Worked well, and eventually I decided to submit the theme as nista to D.O. Then I started to read up on drupal docs and clean up and add where I could. Messed around with some modules. Then summer of code came along and I thought, what the hay? :)
Christopher Bradford, Document Import API
Hi!
I am Christopher Bradford and I will be working on the Document Import API this summer. Currently I attend VCU in downtown Richmond, VA as an Information Systems major (I want to get a minor in Computer Science as well). For the past three years I have been developing websites professionally in a variety of languages and environments. I mostly work with PHP / MySQL, and occasionally C# and MSSQL.
Last year I was introduced to Drupal through SoC 2007. I was looking to find a project that dealt with PHP and caught my interest. Looking at the list of ideas there was a proposal for a BitTorrent module and the rest is history. Since my introduction to Drupal I have developed quite a few Drupal modules for various websites. I have also worked with a bit of custom theming as well as hooking Drupal up to a custom flex RIA using services.
For this year's project I saw the idea of a "Word Import Module" and jumped at the thought. I have experience parsing Microsoft Word XML including creating a custom parser which used PHP's DOM functions to traverse that interesting structure. As the comments on the idea page and my application started accumulating the module shifted from importing a solitary format to an API for importing variable data types and then mapping the data to the various input fields of nodes. The scope has grown from parsing .doc files into creating a plugin based platform that will handle a large variety of data types as well as be expandable to support future types as well.
As far as this summer is concerned, I try to be in #drupal as much as possible. Feel free to contact me there, skype, or email. I really enjoy hearing others thoughts and ideas. Right now, I am looking forward to this summer and the projects that will come of it. Good luck to everyone participating this year!
~Chris
Wiki Page
Project Page
~Chris
Kyle Mathews, Memetracker
Hi! I'm Kyle Mathews and a masters student in Information Systems at Brigham Young University. I'm passionate about tools that help people communicate and collaborate better. I've become heavily involved with Drupal as part of my research job at school. We study how web2.0 tools can help students learn better. Drupal core and the many amazing contributed modules have helped me easily put together a number of very successful classroom sites. Island is our latest site which I built for the Information Systems department.
My interest in memetracking technology comes from my interest in tools that help people communicate together. The basic problem my memetracker module will try to solve is how to help individual members of online communities track the most important conversations in their community. Right now in the Drupal community, conversations are fragmented. People converse on blogs, forums, issue queues, groups, mailing lists, etc. but there's no unified spot where all these separate threads are brought together. It takes a lot of time right now to follow all the conversations on these different platforms and is difficult to get a big picture view of what is being discussed. I'd like to help solve this "conversation tracking" problem for the Drupal community and for the many other online communities.
I'm excited to work on such an interesting problem and am thankful for everyone at Google and here in the Drupal community who have made this opportunity possible. Hopefully I'll live up to the trust you've placed in me.
A little about myself. I love learning, reading, ideas, traveling, meeting new people, and sports of all sorts especially running and basketball. Interestingly, I'm the third Drupal SoC student from Utah. I'm not sure how it happened that three students were selected from Utah but go Utah!
I look forward to getting to know many of you this summer (and beyond) as we work together to solve beautiful problems.
Kyle Mathews
Kyle Mathews
Sumit Kataria doing "OAuth Integration to ServicesAPI"
Hi all
I am Sumit from India. I am doing my engineering in computer science from Punjab Engineering College here in Chandigarh, India.During summer I will be doing OAuth integration to Services API to make user experience with Drupal more secure and easier.
Talking about OAuth it is like the feature on many cars today where you give the parking attendant a special key to your car that gives him some, but not all, access to your vehicle. On the Web you now have your own keys to dozens of sites but how to best handle the mashup-style case of site A wants you to grant them access to get some data from site B? Ideally you don’t want to give site A your password to site B. OAuth aims to simplify this problem: “It allows you the User to grant access to your private resources on one site (which is called the Service Provider), to another site (called Consumer, not to be confused with you, the User).”
Rob Loach and Andrew(drewish) are my mentors during this project. Both of them are awesome guys :).
Got selected with Drupal in summer of code was really like a dream come true :). I really wanted to be with Drupal during this program and in end I have it. Thanks to Dmitri, Rob, webchick, Charlie. Kim and many others who helped me a lot during application period.
I was first introduced with Drupal 1 year ago by means of 'linux for you' magazine, they had a really impressive article about it and I was very impressed with a thing like that although I had no idea what a cms system really is. But now I have idea what they actually do :D. I have been playing around with different cms systems from about an year now and Drupal is my first choice.
So far we are having a lot of fun in summer of code program doing a lot of introductions meeting new people on irc, making wikis, planning meet-ups.
I just love web so it in my hobbies as well. Apart from it I like music, traveling new places, chatting, watching movies with friends, and i just love TV serial "FRIENDS" :).
Looking forward to be a part of this great Drupal community.....
wiki link : http://groups.drupal.org/node/10910
project link : http://drupal.org/project/oauth_services
My blog : www.sumitk.net (may find some updates about project after 26th)
sumit kataria
www.sumitk.net
SumitK
www.sumitk.net
Carson Lam - Bookings
Hello everyone! My name's Carson, and I'm a first-year student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I'm majoring in Computer Science, which is a department within the Faculty of Science here. Right now I'm taking 2 courses during UBC's summer session: mandatory first-year literature, and one of the 3 mandatory second-year compsci courses. Once I'm done (on the end of the second week of June), I'll officially be a second-year student! I think I'm the only GSoC student in British Columbia...
I'm writing an API for handling bookings within Drupal, as well as another module that uses it to carry out bookings. Drupal currently doesn't have any general framework for bookings, but I need one. So that's why I'm making one! Bookings requirements are too varied for any one implementation to handle all use cases, so an API would take some work off of people. I'm new to Drupal though, so I have been spending some time figuring out how to customize and style it to my needs. I've dabbled with websites for a pretty long time, mostly as an interesting hobby. At the same time as GSoC, I'll be developing the website for my Science Undergraduate Society, which will be using this booking system. I made my own CMS for my high school website using CakePHP. This was when I still found that molding an existing CMS like Drupal to suit my requirements was too daunting. My CMS is still in use, though!
I'll find almost any technical topic interesting, given enough time to delve into it. I'm moving deeper into the world of compiled code due to my courses: C++! I'm eager to eventually use it to make interesting things. Graphics, perhaps?
I don't play games a lot, but when I enjoy it when I do, even though I'm terrible in practically every genre. The games I stick to are Garry's Mod and Team Fortress 2. I haven't played any games from January until just last week, when I went on a TF2 marathon (and got 30 Medic achievements legitimately).
Hopefully I'll get to know a lot of you in the coming months!
— Carson
Allister Beharry, Views output to XML/RDF/JSON/XHTML
Hi, I'm Allister Beharry. I'm from Trinidad and Tobago - a tiny 2-island country right at the very end of the Caribbean island chain, just above South America.
I'm studying for a B.A. in math and linguistics from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine This is my second year with Drupal in GSoC; last year I contributed the DAST project. I'm really stoked about my current project as I can envision tons of uses for it and any contribution to making the Semantic Web a reality is definitely noteworthy. As static HTML websites transition to using CMSs, implementing CMS extensions like this could become a model for pushing the web towards the Semantic Web vision.
When not at the computer I like reading, listening to all types of music, watching films and anime, video games, and learning new languages.
You can usually find me lurking in #drupal as allisterb and I blog at http://allisterb.blogspot.com. I hope I get the chance to meet personally with all the SoCr's this summer. One thing that makes Drupal stand out from other open-source projects is the terrific community around it.
Thomas Seidl, improving the apachesolr module
Hi, everyone!
My name's Thomas and I currently study at the Vienna University of Technology, in Austria, for Bachelor degrees in Computer Science and Engineering Physics.
My project for the GSoC is, in short, to work on and improve the existing apachesolr module. I think, this is useful because a good search engine can be a great bonus for a web site, as well as an unsatisfactory one can be a serious problem. Therefore, improving the integration of one rather good fulltext search engine in drupal will help many sites to achieve higher customer satisfaction.
As for my hobbies: apart from computers in general, and especially programming, I like to play soccer, to read and to play video games. At the moment, Final Fantasy XII is probably the most serious threat to my project. ;)
And as for a picture: there really does not seem to be a single one on which I don't look silly in some way, or at least bored. My apologies!
Edit: Now got one, taken while going to the Indy 4 movie. (Hence the hat.)
Good luck to all participants!
Thomas
Joakim Stai - Icon.module
Hi all,
My name is Joakim Stai and I'm from Norway, Yurop. I'm studying Digital Media Production at Østfold University College. I've been making websites since I was about 13, and coding in PHP since I was about 15. In 2006 I discovered Drupal, and I've been in love with the project and the community ever since.
My SoC project is the Icon module, which allows developers, themers and end users to use icons in their modules, themes and Drupal installations in general. It will support icon packs/sets, common in open source desktops, and aims to provide a standard platform for icons in Drupal. I'm really excited about this, and hope it will help improve Drupal's usability.
Usability is something I'm interested in, as well as front-end stuff and the semantic web. When I'm not in front of a computer, I'm probably watching or playing football (soccer), listening to music, DJing, watching movies or traveling. I'm also interested in art (graffiti and other visual kinds). I also speak Spanish and dream of living and working in Spain some day, así que si necesitas un desarollador de Drupal y front-end, por favor, mándame un email :)
Version Control API
Hi!
For my SoC project I will be working on the Version Control API which together with it's backend modules decouples the Project module from a specific Revision Control System by providing a RCS-independent API. Right now, if you want to use a VCS which is integrates with Drupal you're pretty much limited to CVS (anyone who knows CVS will agree that this is suboptimal =D). So in the end with the Version Control API will offer a convenient solution to integrate other VCSes with Drupal.
On a sunny afternoon I also enjoy playing basketball or going mountain biking. I like to travel (most recently I've been to Iceland, Dubai and Thailand), I read a lot (apart from tech-books mostly novels, lyric poetry and philosophy) and I also enjoy a good movie or video game (very much looking forward to Fallout 3 since I've spent *weeks* playing the prequels =D).
Aron Novak - aggregator
My name is Aron Novak (Novák Áron). I finished my third BSc year at BME, Hungary.
Last year I wrote FeedAPI. It was really exciting to see how quickly people accepted the module and started to use it.
I've worked on Drupal coding for two years. Before that I ran some non-profit Drupal sites.
About myself:
I like to attend Drupal conferences. :) It's definitely a great thing to do! If you are a first time Drupal SoCer, i suggest you to join the next Drupalcon.
I enjoy literature and theater performances in my free time.
You can check out my personal webpage for more details. Only in Hungarian, sorry :)
This year I'm going to write a core aggregator replacement. This is a really exciting challenge for me! Coding for Drupal core means requirements for code quality and robustness.
Ezra Barnett Gildesgame - Nodequeue Companion Modules
Hi,
I'm Ezra Barnett Gildesgame. I'm pursuing my undergraduate degree in Psychology with a focus on Cognitive Psychology at the New School University in New York City.
I'm looking forward to my 2nd Drupal Birthday in a few weeks! I've tinkered in web development for a while, and have had some sort of computer-related job since I started high school. I decided to pursue web development more seriously after deciding that, with no pay, "possibly making sandwiches" for music recording artists wasn't a desirable job offer. I purchased a few computer books and studied PHP, MySQL and Javascript more seriously and moved from Portland, OR to Boulder, Colorado to pursue a job at pingVision. I joined pingVision in December of 2006 and continue to work there (mostly by telecommute). I also provide occasional independent Drupal consulting. I maintain the Subgroups for Organic Groups and Anonymous Contact modules and am grateful for this opportunity to devote time towards more community contribution!
The Node Queue Companion modules will make it easier for individual users as well as members of Organic Groups to create and manage ordered lists of content. Like many of Earl Miles' modules (ie Views, Panels), Node Queue empowers users by allowing them to display content in controlled ways without having to write code. I like that the two companion modules I am building will empower users on an individual level as well as at a group level.
Outside of the computer world, I am passionate about music. I play guitar and frequently wish I would devote more time to practicing.