summer of code

Hi All,

Google Summer of Code is back! It has been publicly announced, and applications from mentoring organizations (that's us - Drupal) to participate will be due the last week of Feb (just in time for everyone to be distracted by Drupalcon! … hmm.... ).

No organization admin has been chosen yet (aah time to get webchick in picture). That will be decided in coming weeks.

So let's start talking strategy about how to tackle managing SoC moving forward. We need people to help, preferably by a team of former mentors, students, and ardent summer of code fans.

Want to help? Sign yourself up!

Students and Mentors, this is a reminder that SoC midterms start on Monday, July 6th. Luckily, I have a week off for that week, so I'll be checking in with each and every student to make sure everyone is doing ok. Please note that students need to be fully on the path to completing their SoC project, and they need approval from the mentor in order to receive their midterm check from Google.

Please leave a comment here if you have any questions, issues, etc. and GOOD LUCK!!!

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.

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.