[GSoC Proposal] Improving groups.drupal.org interface

Who: Elayne Morais, I'm always available at GTalk. IRC nickname: emorais
I'm an Computer Science undergradraduate student at University of Campinas (Unicamp) in Brazil.

Have you contributed to a open source project before? No, I haven't. But I really want to start.

Why do you want to do a project involving Drupal? I never worked with Drupal. I'm finishing college and looking for something I can get engaged in. I think Drupal is a great choice, especially because its community is so welcoming.

Overview: I like the project idea for improving groups.drupal.org interface. I'm new to Drupal, so this would be a good start to learning about Drupal itself and about its community. I hope I can make improvements that will help everybody here.

Description:
Improvements to the interface are not hard to implement. I'll need to collect sugestions from the community, what's missing, what's too much, what could be changed, and then create a preview. From that, it's just start working. What is fascinating about this is that I can get some visibility and at the same time I can help community to interact better.

Schedule:
Summer break in Brazil is Dec-Feb. Our first semester (your Spring term) is finished around second week of June and our second semester (Fall term) starts at the beggining of August. Thus, I'll have one and a half month of free time. I'm taking just a few classes this semester, so it won't be hard to dedicate time to the project, even more time than a summer break.

Week 1: Get familiarized with Drupal 6 and groups.drupal.org.
Week 2-4: Brainstorm and ideias propose to community.
Week 3-5: Implement first ideas broadly agreed and keep hearing from community.
Week 6-7: Implement some more ideas and keep hearing from community.
Week 8-10: Get final resolutions about ideas and implement them.
Week 11: Show results, get feedback.
Week 12-13: Make final adjustments.

Mentors:
Talking to Greggles, who wants to mentor this project.
Also, Wundo wants to help students from Unicamp.

Puzzle:
The trick is that isset() checks if $a is set and not null, and empty() checks if $a is CONSIDERED empty, what does not necessarily means that $a is null. This is the case of an array, for example.

Links:
Proposal: http://groups.drupal.org/node/140649#comment-463669
Sandbox: http://drupal.org/sandbox/emorais/1120342
Melange: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2011/elayn...

Still open for feedbacks.