GSoC Doc Sprint Summit

I am a Google Summer of Code 2011 student. I am working on DrupalGapps (Google Apps Framework for Drupal) for my GSoC project.

I'd like to participate in the GSoC Doc Sprint Summit for documenting DrupalGapps. How should I go about doing it? Should I register by myself or can the Drupal community propose/register for me?

Here is my proposal:

What is the project about?
DrupalGapps is a contributed module for Drupal. The project aims at achieving seem-less integration of Google Apps in Drupal.

DrupalGapps is a framework for Google Apps and Drupal integration. It strives to provide API for integration of Google Apps’ management and applications APIs like Admin Settings API, Migration API, Calendar Data API, etc.

DrupalGapps is a contributed module for Drupal and is available at http://drupal.org/project/drupalgapps.

Status of the project:
DrupalGapps was selected by the Drupal community as a project for GSoC 2009. The project was proposed by Ankur Saxena and he successfully completed development of wrapper API for Google Provisioning API (using ClientLogin authentication protocol). Ankur was mentored by Kaustubh Shrikanth (primary) and Robert Wohleb (co-mentor).

Stella Power contributed UI and application which made use of DrupalGapps API to provide UI for user-management in Drupal. This contribution was included in DrupalGapps as a sub-module.

All the work done until here is Drupal 6 compatible.

Further work is in progress on DrupalGapps as a part of GSoC 2011 where Vaidik Kapoor is working on porting DrupalGapps to Drupal 7, integrating 2-legged and 3-legged OAuth authentication and developing Google Docs wrappers and Google Docs like application for Drupal. Vaidik is being mentored by Kaustubh Shrikanth (primary), Stella Power (co-mentor), Ankur Saxena (co-mentor) and Daniel Wahner (co-mentor).
Links: Proposal and project wiki.

As of now, DrupalGapps is available for Drupal 7, 3-legged OAuth integration and development of wrapper API for Google Docs is complete. Further work is in progress.

Some Statistics:
Reported installs: 15 sites currently report using this module.
View Detailed Statistics

Similar Modules:

1. Google Auth - Drupal module - supports OAuth standard for API authentication.
   Reported installs: 14 sites currently report using this module.
   Link
2. Google Authentication for Web Applications - Drupal module - supports AuthSub standard for API authentication.
   Reported installs: 323 sites currently report using this module.
   Link
3. Google Apps Authentication - Drupal module - provides SAML wrappers for single sign-on with Google.
   Link

Future Development:
As of now there are a few things that we have in mind that we’d like to see in DrupalGapps:

1. Single Sign-On using SAML
2. Calendar Data API Integration
3. Admin Settings API Integration
4. Some other management APIs

Reasons:

1. Currently, DrupalGapps is in use only on some websites. One of the major reasons for this is lack of documentation and starter guides/handbooks, which makes it difficult for a site admin or developer to directly put DrupalGapps to use like other modules which are well documented on drupal.org.

   With DrupalGapps documented, more and more site developers/admins will take DrupalGapps in use for Google Apps integration in a customized web application made using Drupal.

   We plan to focus documentation sprint on 3 areas :

   1. DrupalGapps code documentation to help developers contribute easily to the module and build features very easily.
   2. “How to Guides” for the Administrators deploying Drupal and want to integrate Google Apps with it.
   3. “How to Guides” for Developers who want to use Drupalgapps API in their module, hence extending functionality to different spectrums.
2. With a good documentation in place, DrupalGapps API can be used for developing Drupal modules for integration of services of Google Apps into Drupal.
3. Drupal, being so robust and highly accepted as a CMS, and with DrupalGapps available for Google Apps integration, Drupal will become the first choice of CMS for a lot of site developers when Google Apps is to be integrated in a web application.
4. Google Apps integration can be beneficial for a lot of web application and there could be a lot of developers (Joomla and other CMSs developers) who could be looking for a perfect solution for Google Apps integration. This can probably encourage migration from Joomla and other CMSs to Drupal.
5. Google Auth module for Drupal has already been merged into DrupalGapps. With time, other related modules and additional functionalities will be added to DrupalGapps and DrupalGapps will become the one-stop-shop for everything related to Google Apps. This is the right time for documenting DrupalGapps for encouraging more use and for encouraging developers to contribute.

If there is space, I'd love to participate as well.

People I know about who have indicated they might want to come to this (6 people, and we can only propose 5):
- Jennifer (me)
- Lee
- Eric
- Kristof
- Pablo
- Also Margo who commented above wrote privately to me and asked to come.
Did I miss anyone else who said they wanted to go?

I think this is a great opportunity to talk to people from other open source projects' documentation teams (the conference portion) and to write some badly-needed Drupal documentation (the sprint portion), and I would like to make sure that the team we propose is really committed to both aspects, and to bringing their experiences back to the Drupal project. I know Lee, Eric, and Kristof well... Pablo and Margo -- I'm less familiar with your backgrounds and how you've been contributing to the Drupal project (or plan to in the future)... anything you can tell me to help decide?

Also... Is everyone on the list definitely able to take off a week to go to California in October (plus travel time), and does everyone still want to go? I'd hate to eliminate one person and then find out that one of the ones I included actually couldn't make it. So is everyone committed?

I would definitely like to attend the conference and help build the Quick Start Guide as I have plenty of experience writing user manuals for a beginner's audience (mainly in Dutch but also in English).

I have no problems freeing time in my agenda in October for this, so I can commit myself to this.

My only drawback would be the travel time which is more than 12 hrs in my case (best scenario). I don't mind the travelling but if you find a good team that lives a bit closer, than it could be more convenient.

I'm 95% sure I'll be out West for the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit, as well as BADCamp, and I was wondering what I'd do in the interim week, so this sounds like an awesome opportunity. I've been shying away from documentation work recently, and I wasn't involved in the GSoC this year, but I definitely would love to attend the summit and help create these beginner docs. I don't know if I can really swing missing 4 days of work, but I'm sure I can figure out a way to make it work if I can be of assistance.

One thing that I'm curious how you'd like handle are the areas for which there is no clear "right way" to do things (or more precisely: there are 2 or more "right ways"). Some basic examples would be content sliders, "block" and "context" functionality, and admin bars.

Anyway, let me know if I can help.

Thanks!

I am in too.

Regarding me:

• can they make it for the entire Doc Summit
  -- Yes

• do they need travel assistance
  -- Yes, at least partially. travel costs from europe will be around 1000 eur (cheapest fair)

• where will they be traveling from
  -- Brussels, Belgium

• Anyway, it seems likely that if we're accepted, our group of 5 will be reduced, and likely to the North American folks...
  -- that sounds fair to me. As said before via email: I would be thrilled to participate in an event like this but I have doubts whether that justifies costs & burned fossil fuels

Hi, All --

I'm sorry to hear the group didn't get selected for the docs summit -- I've been following that discussion as well as the one from Drupalcon London on docs sustainability and hoping for progress on both fronts.

My business partner (Dick Johnson) and I took a Drupal class and have been gaining Drupal experience (5 live sites so far -- all on Drupal 7 -- for a variety of organizations) and would like to make a specific proposal that we think might help the QuickStart effort for D7 as well as Ariane's options 2-4 from Drupalcon:
2 Divest the handbook from the docs team and write a central guide from scratch
3 Improve infrastructure (possibly XML-based)
4 Recruit more people (we aren't a TON, but there are two of us)

We can help in one or more of the following areas -- would appreciate the team's reaction to how, specifically, we could best work within the team structure. We could get started immediately.

• Help write the Drupal 7 QuickStart Guide (under the guidance of someone more experienced than we are). We are certainly not ready to tackle this on our own, but we'd be glad to help if we can.

• Prototype the QS Guide as a DITA-based, structured doc set published as a set of topics to a Drupal 7 site. Our specialty is content-rich sites, and we have been experimenting on D7 with what we call DITAmashups: structured and unstructured information colocated on the same site and "linked" with a universal set of metadata.

We have "invented" DITAmashups not as an abstract concept, but in response to many structured/unstructured problems that we have observed and our clients have brought to our attention: How to keep a reasonable level of control over "official" product documentation and still take advantage of the expertise and enthusiasm of the wider community of users.

We envision organizations using the structured set for the tightly-controlled information and the unstructured set (blogs etc) as the informal, crowdsourced information. Both of our sites are works-in-progress. We welcome comments.

You can see the D7 site at www.ditainfo.info. We have also done a WordPress site using the same structured material at www.xmldocs.info. The "about this project" topics explain more about why and how we did what we did.

• Write additional documentation, especially in the area of API documentation. Because the blogapi contributed module has not yet been ported to D7, Dick wrote his own publishing api module, which he used to publish our DITA topics to our Drupal site. He has written about it already and plans to document it further, and we could branch out and help in other, similar areas. We'd be glad to make the package available to the Drupal docs team and to the wider Drupal community.

We've been contributing to the DITA/XML open source community for about 5 years, and we'd like to contribute in a similar way to Drupal, now that we have gotten hooked on its many merits as a publishing platform!

Please let us know how we can best help your efforts, now that we have made some progress on the Drupal learning spectrum.

Thanks, Anna and Dick