Front-page drupal.org GHOP final status report

Below is a draft of the front-page final status report on GHOP. Feedback is appreciated. :)
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Note: This post assumes that you are aware of the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. If not, see that link, or listen to the latest Lullabot podcast about GHOP.

Since our last status report on January 2, 2008:

• An additional 12 students have taken on tasks from the Drupal project, bringing our total to 54 student participants.
• 11 new students have completed one or more tasks, bringing our total to 49, which means that Drupal has just gained that many AWESOME contributors! Of that number, approximately 65% are brand new contributors who came to the Drupal project because of this contest.
• There have been a total of 136 tasks completed so far, which is more than double the last report, which marked us at 67 completed tasks. This means that 69 new tasks to benefit the community have been done in just the last month. The leaders in terms of raw task numbers are boombatower (12) and Corsix (15), with cwgordon7 (9), kourge (9) and ezyang (10) coming up behind. As their high drupal.org user ids indicate, all of these top students except kourge and cwgordon7 were brought to Drupal from the GHOP program— and they are planning on remaining long-term contributors to the Drupal community.
• Thanks to everyone for all of the community support we've received on this project! Your help made it possible for these students to experience the power of an awesome open source community, and gave the community a big boost in the number of contributors.

This is it, GHOP is over! However, judging from it's success, we feel confident that this program will be repeated again next year. There will also be a session on GHOP at Drupalcon if you're interested in learning more about the program and what has been achieved in the past two months.

Read on for a description of the tasks that have been completed since the last status update.

Drupal's GHOP Students Rule!

Here's a list of our newly completed tasks in the past 3 weeks.

Coding

• Corsix braved one of the most challenging tasks available, and thrived in his creation of the new flexifilter module, a powerful tool that allows site builders to create highly customizable filters and coders with a simple, clean API to work with.
• boombatower also wrote the new Click HeatMap module, which provides integration between Drupal and the ClickHeat library.
• cwgordon7 wrote a patch for the core taxonomy module to make synonyms more useful in freetagging vocabularies, both by suggesting the base term in the drop-down autoselect field when a synonym is entered, as well as reverting synonyms to their base terms upon submission.
• Corsix also wrote a workflow-ng logging module, and then went on to add views support for that module.
• kourge fixed the Drupal autocomplete throbber so that it works in Safari 2.
• ezyang modified the API module (which powers http://api.drupal.org/) to show documentation of global variables.

Quality Assurance

• Corsix also wrote simpletestsfor the cck module, in order to ensure that this very important module maintained it's high quality.
• Speaking of simpletests, boombatower wrote simpletests for the comment module and the filter module. Simpletests for core are crucial to write because Drupal core needs to be extremely stable before release, and simpletests will help to ensure that stability.

Documentation

• birdmanx35 wrote documentation for the new flexifilter module, and posted it to the Drupal handbooks.
• kourge updated and improved the audio module's flash player theming documentation.
• boombatower created a presentation on the simpletest module, emphasizing its use in quality assurance.
• TimRogersCool created a presentation on the power of open source software and how, in particular, it could help his school.

User Interface

• cwgordon7 updated the project module's user interface to be more intuitive. Drupal.org itself depends on the project module.

Videos

• boombatower created a 30-second Drupal commercial.

What comes next?

GHOP is now over, and a huge success, thanks to your support. We hope to continue this next year— but for now, we have created a new, Drupal-specific project that will continue this success: DROP (Drupal Rockin' Open Participation). DROP will strive to capture the small, bite-sized task aspect of GHOP: but there will be no age restrictions of any sort, as well as only recognition as a prize. Want to see your name up here in a month or two? Then become a DROP participant, and begin doing tasks! See this article for more information on this exciting new project!