SoC 2007

It's been a long time since I last posted an update on the state of the Version Control API, assuming we disregard short teasers on Planet Drupal. Since this last article, Version Control API nearly died during my attempts to wholly restructure the data model for practically everything involving commits, branches & tags (now unified as "labels") and repository items (= files and directories). Luckily, the story has come to a good end. Well, "end"? Depends.

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?

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

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

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is a U.S. nonprofit foundation dedicated to the news industry. Since 1950 the foundation has granted more than $300 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression. The foundation focuses on projects with the potential to create transformational change.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is a U.S. nonprofit foundation dedicated to the news industry. Since 1950 the foundation has granted more than $300 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression. The foundation focuses on projects with the potential to create transformational change.

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.

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. :)

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!!

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:

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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:

<

ul>

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:

<

ul>

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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)!

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.

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.

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.