SoC 2007

It's never too early to start thinking about the next round of Summer of Code. If you're interested in joining the mentoring team, leave a comment here!

What are the requirements for becoming a mentor?

Hi guys, I'm now in Sunnyvale, and feelin dizzy. Shared a shuttle ride from the airport to our hotel. Tomorrow na ang Summit and I can't wait to see Googleplex and meet the other SoC'ers.

Pictures here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=16822&l=b68eb&id=677221339
and here http://apophenicpinoy.multiply.com/photos/album/13/San_Francisco_Intl_Airport_to_Sunnyvale_CA

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Seems I haven't given up on Version Control API & friends by now, which one could say is a good thing. Due to my rather silent nature, there haven't been as many g.d.o posts as during the Summer of Code (namely, none until now). Nevertheless a good share of remaining issues have been resolved, and missing features have been added. Here's a short rundown of what has been achieved since part 2 of my wrap-up, which was written a month ago.

For the second year in a row, Google is putting on a Summer of Code Mentor Summit at their Mountainview Campus on Oct. 6, to allow all the projects to come together and share success stories, advice, lessons learned, and brainstorm about how to make the project better. Each project gets to send up to 3 delegates to the summit.

Here's the list of Drupal folks who will be attending:

1. Rok Žlender, who was a successful SoC student turned successful SoC mentor, as well as just an awesome guy all around. :) Google loves getting to meet the faces behind their success stories. :)
2. Ruben D. Canlas Jr., who is a Drupal SoC veteran, and has offered testing and useful advice to several students in the SoC-2007 group.
3. Simon Hobbs, who is a SoC first-timer whose student couldn't say enough nice things about him, and who was very active both in #drupal-soc and in the SoC-2007 group providing advice.

Congratulations, folks! I'll be e-mailing you with the next steps. :)

Looks like the SoC session made the list, at the end of the first day. Woohoo!

Looking through the list of attendees, it looks like the following students will be there:
- Balazs Dianiska (snufkin) - Drawing API
- Matthias Hutterer (mh86) - Taxonomy Manager
- Gábor Hojtsy (Gábor Hojtsy) - Localization server
- Aron Novak (Aron Novak) - FeedAPI
- Jakob Petsovits (jpetso) - Version Control API
- Will White (diggersf) - SMS Framework

a) Is there anyone else coming who isn't on this list?
b) Is everyone who's coming cool with presenting their projects for about 5-10 minutes during the SoC session? (16:00 - 17:00 on Wed, Sept. 19)
c) Of those presenting, are there any special requirements that we should know about in advance? (you won't have a laptop, so need certain things prepared, there must be a purple emu standing in the back...). If so, can you please let me know what they are so I can do my best to make sure they're there?

@everyone else: I will try and demonstrate the rest of the projects with the remaining time. Last year, this meant i had about 8 minutes to present like 11 projects. ;) So if you would all be so kind as to make sure you have "demo" links available @ http://drupal.org/node/169104 and that they're working as of Sept. 18, that would allow me to show people your awesome work!!

More instructions available here: http://groups.google.com/group/google-summer-of-code-announce/web/how-to...

Your code must be uploaded to http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2007-drupal/downloads/lis... by Sept. 17, or you will be expected to return your final payment (aka you won't be paid).

Note that the code uploaded should be a snapshot of what was in CVS on August 20, the final day of SoC. You can do this by:

Over the course of the summer my project has taken shape and become quite a full fledged search solution. This new search module allows for small typing errors, includes calls to pre-existing search module hooks such as nodeapi's 'update index' op, and includes an interface to allow external modules to modify node scoring.

ok folks, here's a short compilation of my "lessons-learned"!
As I got deeper into drupal (and in my case, into ecommerce module as well), I found out that some aspects of my project aren't feasible, so I needed to change a few things.
I also discovered that the ebay api is in fact huge, you could practically do a full-blown ebay agent software. I resorted to implement basic functions which I assume will be needed by almost anyone. The module should be easily adaptable to specific needs.

If you already had a go at part 1, you have been waiting half a week for this one. Lack of internet, party intermezzos and my first company outing caused a minor delay, but here you are!

The SoC has come to an end, and so has the beginning of the development of Light Fantastic theme.

An online demo is available, but I have not yet made a release since there are some minor IE-related bugs I'd like to take care of before that.

The theme is intended to be very customizable, with support for fixed-width and fluid layouts, with single, two or three columns. The column widths could be set too. There are some additional regions above and below the main content area which could be used for featured content.

It's over! Google Summer of Code 2007 had its official "pencils down" on Monday, 19:00 UTC - which was 21:00 at my place, perfect for a last sprint... but I digress. According to Google, mentors are supposed to evaluate projects based on the state that they were in at that time. Which means it's time for me to wrap it up and explain what I achieved in those two or three months. In addition to these writings, I set up a test site at http://www.petsovits.at/versioncontrol/ where you can try out most of these things in action.

The wrap-up is becoming too long to conveniently fit into one single blog entry, so I'll split it up into two halves. This one basically covers the hard facts: which modules I wrote during the Summer of Code, what they do, and how they work. (Part 2 is now also available.)

I thought it might be better to post a heads up that the code submission process changed. Instead of Google giving us time intervals based on our names, they are creating projects for each SoC organization (Drupal will have one too) and students are expected to submit their code there. New instructions and much tighter timeline: http://groups.google.com/group/google-summer-of-code-announce/web/how-to...

Also, anyone can submit their surveys now (mentors and students alike), so do it soon, not to miss the deadline.

Well today was the supposed deadline for the Google Summer of code project. I have uploaded what I have done at the moment for the supposed deadline to the CVS. You can visit my site and play around with it some, although there are a few bugs that still need to be worked out on it and a few features I will be adding that I didn't get to by the deadline today.

It's the last day of SoC, so time to wrap up the first release of the Deco theme.

A lot has changed since my last post. Mainly bug fixing and browser support, but I've also added the following features:

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Today, the SoC program official ends. I'm glad that I was able to make the first release of my project today. Last week has been an intensive week of testing (thanks to all my tester) and the weekend has even been more intensive with bug fixing and today I finally had time to write some documentation. So I think, most things are done.

Well, I have not been able to implement every detail I planned for this project, but nonetheless, done lots of stuff in different projects this summer. The work continues for sure, so we can get the localization server online (possibly as part of groups.drupal.org) sometime soon. There is a quick and dirty video of the localization server interface as it stands now, after the jump.

Everyone should be ready to commit the final versions of their projects by 19:00 UTC Aug 20, 2007. So get in those last-minute questions to your mentors, canvas the community either here or on the devel list to do some final testing of your projects, and let's all work together to help make this the greatest SoC ever. :)

UPDATE (Aug 18, 2007) More information from Google.

Summary:
- Monday, August 20th at 19:00 UTC: "Pencils down," aka Summer of Code officially ends. Evaluations will be based on code submitted by this time.
- You must supply a copy of your code to Google: instructions
- You must complete a survey. If you don't, you will not be paid. (nor, equally importantly, do you get your t-shirt! ;))
- Friday, August 31st at 19:00 UTC: Final deadline for survey completion.

I've released the first official version of the loadtest module on drupal.org. Most of the documentation on using the module is contained in the README.txt. The module seems to be working pretty well at this point, with the biggest issue being the apache timeout setting killing the tests while their running. So if you try it out, be sure to set apache's timeout to a large enough value that all of the tests can run without being killed.

As I am entering the home stretch of the project I have gotten a small amount of feedback from various testers regarding my fuzzy search module but so far have gotten no feedback on how good the algorithm is at returning relevant results. I have just recently reworked my algorithm to tighten up the matching. I'd really appreciate it if I could get a person with a site that has over 400+ nodes or so to test out the module and see how fast it performs and how relevant they believe the results are.

Some highlights from recent weeks that I think I forgot to mention:

More soon...

Well things are wrapping up and I can happily report the public/private uploads are working (more or less)!

Just as we did at the start of Summer of Code, let's have another call now that we're at the end of Summer of Code, for all the SoC students to talk about their work over the summer, lessons learned, and what's next on the horizon for your projects.

The end of the Google Summer of Code is nearing, and stuff is coming together in my version control modules. It seems to me like I'll not be achieving everything that I would have liked, but most of the important stuff is going to be ready next Monday. And now for a short report of the last one-and-a-half weeks.

Guess I overestimated a bit the amount of time needed to make the necessary changes to the subscriptions module. A live demonstration is now up and running on my development site. Please create a new account and follow the instructions posted here to see IM notifications in action.

How many SoC students are planning on being at FrOSCon? I know that Gábor and Balazs will be there. Who else can come?

I'll be presenting everyone's projects on Saturday (the 25th), and what I actually say or show will depend somewhat on you =) If you don't have a demo site online, please consider making one by then. If you provide me with materials to help present your work, I will use them. I will almost certainly stop short of installing and testing all 20 projects' code, simple due to time constraints, so your help in preparing materials and test/demo sites is needed.

I've been spending most of the last week working on the project_usage.module. I got a copy of the usage data that's been reported to Drupal.org and spent some time fixing bugs (#167074) and making some small improvements (#167079, #167048). My big goal has been to get some code together to make the usage data visible (#165380). I've attached a few screen shots to show how it works.

This Friday I posted the third release of my library, which followed two days of public testing via the demo page. Unfortunately, very few people ran the demo and all of them were using gmail accounts, so really I didn't get any new information from that. Oh well... Today I updated the Drupal module to work with the latest library revision, documented the API, and created the server admin interface. After some testing tomorrow I'll commit all of this to Drupal CVS and make the first official release for my module. Following that, I expect to finish my patch for the subscriptions module either Thursday or Friday, which will give me two days to wrap up any loose ends before SoC final deadline.

-Max

We are getting closer to the official end of SoC, so it's time now to stop implementing new features and to to do a lot of testing and to fix bugs, so that I'm hopefully able to release a first version of the Taxonomy Manager by end of SoC.

Results:

• A release after the beta
• updated developer documentation (it changed a lot because of the concept changes)
• Screencast for users to make familiar with installing, setup and use the module

I have to admit, that i'm glad that the issue queue is full of feature requests, it seems that people want to use FeedAPI for various purposes. And yeah, their purposes are not impossible with FeedAPI (using the API, developers can write the proper modules)

As a result of ripping off the taxonomy module to make community managed taxonomy, I noticed some extra SQL in there. And it's been removed. I find this quite exciting, affecting core... even if just removing a few unnecessary letters.

As for Community Managed Taxonomy itself, the editing of community-managed vocabularies and necessary administration options that weren't even mentioned in any posted plans. Pushing through with node-based term adding and arranging as outlined in previous posts continues.

Since I had completed most of the work a week back and responded to the bug reports and feature requests, I didn’t have much to do in the last two weeks.

However, I completed the documentation for the modules (readme files) and now I m working on the project report for the whole project and hoping to freeze code in the coming week after discussing with the mentor.

I encourage Drupal community to download and test the modules.
http://drupal.org/project/ulink

or they can test the module by creating new pages at

www.theebgar.phpnet.us/drupal

Several days ago I've committed the theme to Drupal's contributions repository. I decided to call it Deco because it's inspired by art-deco and it's a short and easy to remember name.

I've tried finishing up most of the development because the deadline is due over littme more than a week.

Currently the following things have been implemented:

Regions:
- Header: Like Garland, a region that acts as hook to add html above the whole site
- Content: Goes just below the content
- Before content: Goes just before the content (above the page's title)

I have been continuing work on Views integration and I finally have all specified fields working. I ran into an issue where the bt_torrents table was playing nice with views, but when I tried to use fields from bt_torrents_files everything went screwy and all I would get is an error. This is no fun so I started looking at the code and everything appeared normal. That was my problem I stared at the screen looking for the problem, but it wasn't the kind that just jumps out at you.

So public/private file handling has been progressing pretty well. I've still been having some trouble fixing uploads in HEAD and the changing code base has made this a challenge. However I've become much better at debugging and I'm quickly become a bazaar wizz. The project is still on target to be completed soon and the code should be operating properly quickly. For those interested in the progress you can use bazaar to check out the code from http://drupal.codeincarnate.com.

The Fuzzysearch module is now available for testing and feedback. The results being returned during my tests have thus far been quite good and performance has been better than search.module (overall query times and page generation times were faster with fuzzysearch.module, testing based on results displayed by devel.module).

Please try it out if you have a chance and leave me some feedback/post issues on the project page.

http://drupal.org/project/fuzzysearch

You can try out the module and read more information about the release on my blog http://boldsource.com
-Blake

In the next one or two days I'll release the last version (before SoC end) of my XMPP library, and before that I'd like to have a few people test message delivery to their jabber accounts. This test does not involve Drupal just yet, but it perfectly mimics what my Drupal module will be doing once I update it to work with the latest library revision. As I posted on my development site, this demo would be most useful if people ran it against servers other than Google Talk or Openfire.

Much of last week I didn't have time to work on my summer of code project. I spent a lot of my time on the phone trying to find a house to live and people to live with for this coming fall semester at college (Which starts at the beginning of September). I also had to spend time on the phone to get my classes ironed out and financial aid. I also had to spend some time on a drupal project outside of my summer of code project due to my funds running a little short and bills being due. And I also had to due some phone interviews for job positions after my graduation this coming December.

Thanks for all of your support and ideas during development. I'm getting ready for one final sprint during the last week and I'd appreciate your feedback on the code. The latest revision is currently available in CVS.

http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/contributions/modules/smsframewor...

As of about 2pm PDT Drupal.org has been tracking the module usage. #128827 has been committed to the project module and installed on d.o. There's a follow up issue to make this usage data visible to users (#165380). I've added support to the metrics module to factor that into the score.
I'm not sure if the metrics module will be installed on d.o until the current database troubles resolved.

I've updated my sandbox with the latest loadtest module source. It's ready to use for anyone who wants to play around with it. The loadtest source is in contributions/sandbox/hadsie/loadtest.

The first part of this module lets you define and configure "states" for your site that you can run tests against.

As I've mentioned in the past, another student and I had been tasked with developing Google Apps modules for SoC 2007. SSnider has since made public the excellent Google Auth module.

On my side of the project I've been developing abstraction code for the Google Apps API to make it more Drupal friendly. Part of this development is a user provisioning module. Before I make any of this public, I need a wish-list for a Google Apps provisioning module. I want to make sure I haven't missed any major features. What features do you want? What features are more important than others?

This week was dedicated for the most part to the server implementation. As of today, my XMPP client is essentially finished and the server just needs a few more hours of work. Today I started writing the implementation of server dialback and router extensions, which are the last two pieces needed for a working server. My hope is wrap up the library in the next three days, followed by a day or two for testing and, of course, writing examples and documentation.

The last 2 weeks I spent a lot of time in adding paging mechanism to the tree structure, in separating the tree structure as a own form element type and in adding of a form for editing data from a specific term.

Having finished most of the theme's design I've been busy slicing and coding the theme. Currently every layout type except triple equal column is finished, so what mainly rests is writing CSS for all the Drupal elements.

Just a development snapshot before the 0.2 release - Download http://www.abeharry.info/stuff/DAST-0.2-dev.tar.gz

Unpackage anywhere like usr/share/DAST There is an httpd.conf in DAST/src/tests/etc/tasks/. Now run from DAST:

./bin/dast -f ./src/tests/etc/tasks/eApacheHttpdConfTaskTest.xml

The httpd.conf will be updated with new directives, sections, and embedded sections.

This snapshot has all dependencies bundled so don't download the dast-deps package. You must not place this snapshot in the same location as earlier releases

This week, my Version Control SoC Project saw further completions of the API functions' implementations (the API itself is completely implemented now, if I'm not mistaken) and the creation of extendable admin screens, mainly for repositories for now. There's now a list of repositories separately for each version control system, and each backend can easily customize creation, editing and display of repository information by means of hook_form_alter() and a small number of more specific hooks. Repository management is now at the same level of functionality as the one in cvs.module, only that it's generic at the basics and other backends can without much effort provide their own custom stuff, just like CVS provides CVS modules and different methods of commit information retrieval. Sure, you want screenshots:

I've posted an update on the SMS Framework project and a screencast on the Development Seed blog. It introduces some of the new functionality that I've implemented using the API.

Well, files have been coming along well. Full working private/public upload and download functionality is nearly working and a alpha release for testing will be coming in the very near future. Most of the work left that remains is with file_set_private which is a very important function in the entire scheme of things. As always if you want to get the code bazaar can be used, just point it at http://drupal.codeincarnate.com. Things may be a little delayed because I'm turning 21 tomorrow. Bottoms up!

The alpha version was released last week, after that I fixed a number of bugs and issues. Now if someone check out the CVS, (s)he will find a module which UI is a little bit hard to understand, but the functionality mainly works. I planned to release the beta yesterday, but I didn't do it, because with Alex(the change was his idea and he wrote a proof-of-concept patch) we decide on a radical change. FeedAPI's API part will be changed a little bit.