This group is for the Google Summer of Code, 2009.
Taxonomy Reloaded
Introduction
Taxonomy is Drupal's well-known classification system. It is both powerful and outdated. As chx put it: "Taxonomy is beyond saving.". Taxonomy is slow, doesn't use modern APIs like FAPI and it needs Field integration. Updating existing code would be a long and painful process, since so many things need to be changed: all sorts of code needs to be cleaned up, Field integration, Node.module independency, etc.
Proposal
Read more
Criteria Suggestions for a Succesful SoC Project
This discussion is focused upon hints, tips, and suggestions for how to succeed in a SoC project.
First, some background statistics. The summer of code in 2008 had 23 projects that were accepted and 20 succeeded.
According to Alex, the most important factors for a SoC project are:
- proposal quality
- past student work (i.e. students with a track record are more likely to succeed, thus more likely to get accepted).
- the amount of interaction the student has in the community
- the reputation of the mentors
Transformations idea frenzy!
Overview: Transformations is an API for creating and executing data transformation pipelines, enabling higher-level modules to build stuff like Yahoo! Pipes or targeted import/export interfaces on top of it. The purpose of this project is to improve and build upon Transformations so that it not only provides a base framework but also satisfies a larger number of end-user needs, for example an AJAXified user interface.
Description:
Transformations was born out of the desire for a solution that can map any kind of structured data to any kind of other data, such as importing CSV or more complex XML files into Drupal nodes (with field mappings, obviously), exporting the data to the same files, or, if you will, providing an online converter that converts any RSS feed into Atom for example.
When performing such a large-scale transformation, some elements of the source data will likely need to be transformed on a smaller-scale level, e.g. you might need to convert a Unix timestamp into ISO date format at some point, or remove commas from a number string ("1,099.90") to conform to the target format, or perform string replacements on a given string field. At times, you might even need a combination of those transformations, or reference some other entity to construct the desired output data.
In order to do that kind of stuff, a simple mapping screen is not flexible enough, or would require lots of custom code to handle the more specific tasks. Transformations tries to solve that problem by splitting individual data transformation tasks into individual "operations" that can be chained into a larger transformation pipeline.
Read moreGeneral XSS Smackdown
XSS vulnerabilities are the most common inside web applications.
This proposal regards a series of improvements on existing modules, such as "Security Scanner" module and "Coder" module, and a series of small tools to make XSS research (or maybe other vulnerability research, such as CSRF) more comprehensive and easier to execute.
Bot module extensions and documentation
First update: the aggregator section.
Second update: added bot_bnc for bonus track
Abstract:
Read more
Google Summer of Code Students and Mentors, Start your engines!
The time you've all been waiting for has arrived! As of yesterday students started adding projects to the Official Summer of Code site, and so if you're planning on participating as either a student or mentor, it's time to get a-rollin'!
If you're a student that wants to work on Drupal projects for the summer of code, you should:
- sign up for accounts on both drupal.org and groups.drupal.org
- either locate a proposal that interests you on the Summer of Code group, or add your own idea as a discussion on the Summer of Code group
- if you're interested in a community proposal you should comment on that proposal's discussion to let the community know you're going to put up a proposal
- add the proposals you're interested in to the Official Summer of Code site. IMPORTANT: you can only work on one Summer of Code project per summer, however you can add as many applications as you want and more than one student can add the same basic proposal (though only one proposal will be accepted for each specific idea)
- if you're adopting a community proposal you also should consider creating your own discussion where you work within this site to clarify and perfect your proposal.
If you're interested in mentoring a SoC project, you should:
- sign up to the Summer of Code 2009 Mentors group
- apply to be a mentor on the the Official Summer of Code site (see instructions below in the comments)
- review ideas, create ideas, and most importantly, help the students navigate through the often choppy community waters here.
- if you're interested mentoring one of the proposed ideas you should comment on that proposal's discussion to let students know that mentors are willing to work with them
Also- if you need to reach me and can't find me in the #drupal irc channel, please feel free to send me an e-mail (alex at zivtech) or through my contact form.
Read more
Event Management System
Overview
Implement an events management system inspired by the best user interfaces and features sets out there including facebook events, meetup.com, and existing contributed modules so that we get the user experience right while working elegantly with organic groups.
Description
The context of this proposal is an awesome ;) organization called Democrats Abroad which is a body of the democratic party that represents americans living abroad.
http://www.democratsabroad.org
This context is interesting (fascinating) because it is truly a global community with different organizational levels global, country, country chapter and cross-cutting topical groups on issues and policy. It is thus a great testbed for this type of a module.
The events management system needs to be flexible enough to work with this type of organizational constraints and at the same time be fluid enough in its user interface as to require zero training and not be the cause of increased support.
A good candidate for this project should have a good eye for implementations with great usability and be motivated to implement our specs in such a way that uses and helps improve existing modules as much as possible.
We are also interested in feedback from the community so that any new modules that need to be developed are flexible enough to work in other contexts.
I have been working on some initial UI mockups that I have posted on flickr here so please check them out:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaaloo/sets/72157615671549839/
Mentors:
There are a small number of IT professionals that help out on the DA web site with different skills and roles that will be providing input and guidance to a student that is interested in working with us on this topic. Technical discussions with the developers that are maintaining modules related to this area are seen as essential so that we don't reinvent the wheel and we would be happy to welcome technical advice and participation from the community.
Difficulty: Medium
Read more
Rules Module extension und perfection (a.k.a. Rules monkey)
Overview
The Rules module is designed to support actions that are executed depending on events and conditions (ECA rules) in Drupal. This proposal is about extending and enhancing Rules module with new features and ideas.
Motivation
Read more
Usage statistics for options/features to improve usability
Hello all,
Drupal already has its own statistic system that grabs the number of installation that uses a determined module (here you can see an example: http://drupal.org/project/usage/blocks404).
There's more we can do to make statistics useful. It could be useful to understand the number of users are using a determined feature inside a module, and how are they using this.
Examples:
Read more
Automatic and manual conflict resolver
Currently if two people edit the same node, one can't save. That's not nice and does not scale. Let them save to a new revision --which is not the current one-- and provide tools for conflict resolution. You probably want to display the conflicting resolutions side-by-side and point out which fields differ (it's enough if you cover core and CCK) and provide some diff integration (probably in a popup?) for textfields. This would allow any number of people to edit nodes at the same time without much difficulty.
Read more
Drupal Analytics
Overview: This project will improve the tracking and analysis of website traffic in Drupal.
Description: There is a need for better traffic analysis in Drupal. A possible implementation of this project may involve writing a script separate from Drupal that accesses server logs directly. Other features may include an API to allow contrib modules to log events or a way to send statistics to third party tools, such as Google Analytics.
Some ideas:
- Provide both client and server side tracking APIs.
- Access server logs to get statistics for files and requests not served by Drupal (JavaScript, images, other files).
- Be aware of Drupal's page caching mechanisms and work around those.
- Track actions- Use actions as 'goals'?
- Track JavaScript events.
- Extensibility: Allow analysis plug-ins to be made.
- Performance is a big factor! Traffic tracking shouldn't produce a too big of a load on the system, whether it is database size or performance when actually loading the page.
Please share your thoughts and ideas.
Mentors:
Difficulty: Hard
Read moreIndex & Hierarchy API: browsable data display based on (virtual) hierarchy.
File Management
From my experience,there are a few major things lacking in Drupal. One of them that I have encountered a lot is the ability - or inability to manage files/documents effectively. I'd like to start laying the groundwork for a comprehensive file (or at least document) manager that allows some of the more popular feature requests e.g check in/check out, protected files & directories etc.
Read more
Usability Testing Suite
The last GsoC project we worked on a project called Usability Testing Suite, we made big steps towards a tool to use when your doing usability testing but as the project ended we foundourselves missing some essential elements and extensions that could make it part of a researchers toolbox.
Usability Testing Suite
This project will provide a suite of usability testing tools that will allow data to be recorded and analyzed in order to make improvements to your site and modules. This suite can be used for both remote and local usability testing.
DSNF - Drupal Social Network Framework
Overview: Create an install profile for installation of a social networking framework with Drupal, possiblity to be name the DSNF, or Drupal Social Network Framework.
Description: I believe that modules exist today representing the majority of functionality needed for a social network. The modules are in various states of development, and they may or may not be "prepared" to work well together. This project would consist of four phases:
<
ol>
Read more
Make comments first class object in Drupal 7
Overview: ATM comments can only be connected to nodes, But there are other places first class objects which would benefit from having being able to connect comments to them. In core itself users could be used to build something like a facebook wall where people can comment directly against your user instead of a node. Outside of core modules like API (http://api.drupal.org) which does not use nodes for the api content but allowing comments from core Drupal to the listed functions would bring this invaluable site up to a new level of quality and being able to help the community.
Description: This project is really 3 or 4 parts and not only coding. The first part is to make changes the Drupal 7 comment module to allow comments to be attached to be linked with any type of object. This will also have as a separate peice of work an example of adding comments to users. I am not sure if this will be accepted, but it will demostrate how any module can take advantage this new functionality. When extending the a first class object to take integrate comments the code should be minimal in that it should not take more than 100 lines of code, I would prefer less than 50 lines to add comments to any module.
The next part of this is not a technical challenge but to work with the Drupal community as a whole and see this patch through the Drupal feature queue. Work with the core maintainers and other core patch testers to see this patch committed to core before the code freeze.
During this process the student would identify contrib module that would benefit from have comments added to their obejcts, like the API module to allow developers to comment on things about functions within Drupal, and other projects like e-Commerce which could have comments being added to transactions. Depending on the contributed project and their state in reguards to porting to Drupal 7 this may be a small job or even assisting with help with porting the project enough to contribute a patch to allow for this functionality. This will also help cement the API and make sure that it is simple to implement.
I am actually quite excited by this project because the student will be working with so many people within the Drupal community and the complete emersion into the Drupal culture.
Mentors:
- Gordon Heydon
Difficulty: medium
Read more
Proposal - Community analytics for Drupal
Overview: This proposal is about creating a community dashboard for any Drupal website. Do you want to know how healthy your community is? This dashboard is for you. It will display the key performance indicators of your community: number of new members, number of active users, number of new posts, of new comments, etc. The design will be pluggeable so that any module can publish statistical data (ie. sales amount from your Ubercart store, etc.).
Read more
SoC 2006: AJAX Form Builder - Is there anything like this for Drupal 6?
I am looking to propose a few ideas for SoC 2009. I like the basic functionality of the Webform module that ships with Acquia, but I am wondering if an AJAXy / easy to use implementation has been developed for Drupal 6? I have searched around and cannot find an AJAX forms package for Drupal 6. I did find this same proposal in SoC 2006: AJAX Form Builder, and was wondering if something like this has been developed. Before I make a proposal on this project, I want to be sure that this does not already exist in some fashion.
Read more
Proposal - Modern recolorable theme with configurable "styles"
Overview: The purpose of this project is to build an awesome, modern, recolorable theme that can have different "styles" applied in the settings. The theme will also come with an integrated jQuery plugin, a slideshow or carousel/slider that can be configured in the theme settings.
Description: The proposed theme will integrate with the color module, making the color scheme configurable through the theme settings. In the same way that Garland works, users can choose gradient top and gradient bottom colors and see a preview of the theme.
Community News Installation Pattern with Optional Subthemes
Overview:
A theme and/or installation designed for community and college newspapers.
Background:
Read more