SoC 2008

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

Hi SoCer's,

You can grab the videocast of the Szeged SOC presentation over at http://www.archive.org/details/soc_showcase. It's available in streaming and full formats.

Also, our Google code project page (For code submissions) is live: http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2008-drupal/

Needless to say, our projects pwned.

Please read the details at the page http://groups.google.com/group/google-summer-of-code-announce/web/how-to.... It has been updated recently for SOC 2008.

Greetings, SoC Students!

One of the requirements for completing Summer of Code (aka, getting paid! ;)) is to post weekly status reports about your project each Tuesday. These reports should go in your projects' wiki pages (following the template) in a section marked "Status updates." Ah, yes. You didn't think this whole summer was going to be nothing but fun, sun, and code, did you now? ;) Just kidding. :)

Now, as we all know, writing status reports takes away from valuable coding time. That's why all we're looking for is 3 sentences from you each week:

1. What did you get done this week?
2. What are you planning to do over the next week?
3. Is there anything you're blocked on?

As maybe you heard, my application was accepted to write a new aggregator for Drupal core :) : http://code.google.com/soc/2008/drupal/appinfo.html?csaid=1222E090E875B36D
Here as a first step, I would like to collect lots of possible problems in aggregation area. Please share your opinion about these questions to help Drupal 7 to have as good aggregator as possible :) :

The items are not necessarily ordered by relevance.

Node creation

As you probably know, the Icon Module has been accepted as a Summer of Code project. Thanks a lot for the support and enthusiasm you've already shown! Quicksketch and yoroy will be my mentors this summer (thanks!), and I hope everybody else interested in getting icons into Drupal will help out by sharing their views and knowledge. The project affects themers, icon designers, developers and end users - so any form of feedback is appreciated!

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]

This is my SoC proposal fro Drupal. Please feel free to post questions, suggestions or send me an email.

--------- Project proposal: RSS Overhaul (incl. Encryption) ---------

Improve over current RSS implementation:

• Richer RSS options allowing to include/exclude text contents, images, related comments, digg-like links, etc.
• Allow secure RSS and add access control settings in Admin interface accordingly.

This is a crude abstract, Basically I wish to know if someone can mentor this project and its feasability with taxanomy ..

                      ABSTRACT

Problem

There are many modules that provide half solutions to the problem of referencing nodes in a hierarchical nature. We spoke with webchick about this tonight as a matter of fact. The probnlem rather simply is that while you can use nodereference field to relate nodes (and types) hierarchically ("My car" references "CVR" which references "Honda") this prevents you form storing that information with the actual node for use in views (sorting, filtering, etc) because only 1 portion (the first parent) of the relationship is stored at any level.

Possible Solutions

I think the way information is presented and search results are displayed can be optionally enhanced. This somewhat related to the following discussions, however a new idea
1. http://groups.drupal.org/node/9934
2. http://groups.drupal.org/node/9946

A short description of what I would love to see with this module