summer of code

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. :)

Still not sure why usability testing is important? See what a linux hobbyist found in an informal usability test on Ubuntu.

Usability testing (hereafter "UT") is getting a lot of attention in Drupal -- and rightly so IMHO. If we aim to have "100%" test coverage on Drupal's code and functionality for Drupal 7, it stands to reason we also need test "coverage" on Drupal's usability. If not, it's far too easy for bad interfaces to be developed that pass all the functional and unit tests, but fail miserably in the real world!

Jimmy Berry (aka boombatower) of GHOP fame plans to take the initial (but giant) steps in this direction in the Google Summer of code 2008.

[Continue reading on my blog at CivicActions: civicactions.com/blog/scaling_up_usability_testing_in_drupal]

The following is my first revision of a proposal to create a search API module. I'd love to get some feedback.

Project Details
A Drupal search API would allow for separation between the search interface that end users interact and the back-end indexing and retrieval work that a search engine performs. The advantages to creating a search API are:

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?

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.

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.)

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