SoC

So that's that. After having used the past two months for improving filefield and imagefield, it's about time that I get started with my RCS abstraction project. aclight has been as kind as to publish his work and findings in time with the Summer of Code, so that's a good starting point already. His work on the xcvs scripts (...bootstrapping Drupal, yay) benefits my project a lot, and the issues with password storage are good to know of.

In order to come up with a set of good questions that I'll need to research, I had a first shot on the database schema and the overall idea of how this thing should work. I thought it would be a good idea to see what we want to achieve and what we can rely on, before figuring out how to abstract all the stuff that's supposed to be different among the various revision control systems. Bullet points galore.

After a small discussion on #drupal-soc with chx the following guidelines were suggested for the Summer of Code projects:

Platform: Drupal 5

Do not consider developing directly to Drupal 6, for many reasons. Drupal 5 has a stable documentation as a starter, due to the not yet solid state of 6 hunting bugs will be a devious task, finding out which bug is yours, which is of core and so on.

PHP version

Chose whichever you want, 4 or 5. It should be perfectly fine to pick 5, and there is already a talk about dropping php 4 support in the future.

For any mentors who can make it, please help participate in the SoC Cookoff Dojo lesson. The SoC students will be introducing themselves, and will be asking questions to help them get started.

I've spoken with Josh K of the Drupal Dojo group (which, if you don't know about it, definitely go check it out -- it's like interactive peer-tutoring but so much cooler ;)). He's given me permission to hijack the Sunday, May 27 session slot to do a Q&A session for the Summer of Code students, to answer any questions you folks have before Summer of Code officially kicks off the next day!

The session will start at 11am PDT (California), which is (apparently) 2PM in NYC, 8PM in Hungary, 10PM in Moscow, and 11:30 PM in Sri Lanka (sorry :). It will go on for about 2 hours (or until we run out of steam). The session will also be recorded (both audio and screen) for those who can't make it. Others are more than welcome to show up too (I'm sure the information discussed will be valuable to a lot of folks), but I'd like this to be a session specifically geared toward getting our GSoCers up to speed.

So, what I need to know from folks is a list of questions/clarifications/general topics they'd like covered in this session. Long ago, in a kingdom far away, we came up with an outline as follows: http://docs.drupaldojo.org/getting-started-with-drupal-development ... anything in particular here (or that you've come across in the last few weeks) that grabs your fancy? We can walk you through parts of core, talk about higher-level API stuff, get into community history, explain how to use CVS, or just about anything else you can think of. :)

I'd like to hammer out a tentative agenda sometime towards the end of next week, so please comment and let me know what you'd like to see covered! Also, if as many mentors/students as possible could make it to this session, we could have a nice little introduction thing at the beginning. :)

I put in my application for the Summer of Code last week with the following proposal

Proposal V1[PDF]

I based the goals of it off of the proposed idea at http://drupal.org/node/121112. After receiving some feedback on my application I revised my time line without much change in the actual proposal. The new proposal is at

Proposal V2[PDF]

In the downtime between comment posts on my application I contacted the current module owner and started to become more involved in the community, a few forum posts and more research on my project. With the second round of comments down and an extremely revamped proposal I am looking forward to more comments and assistance from the community. Well here is the third proposal and the abstract.

Proposal V3[PDF]

Adding Semantic Web support into CCK

Motivation

</style></head><body dir="ltr"><p class="P1">Application for Summer of Code 2007:  MultiPublisher Module</p><p class="P1">   by Ryan Grace  <a href="http://www.thefractal.org/">www.thefractal.org</a> :: ryan@thefractal.org </p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2">Synopsis </p>

I just uploaded my application to Google's Summer of Code web app, and I can say I'm quite proud of its current state. The application has seen a couple of iterations based on valuable feedback by Adam Light and Derek Wright, both of which are working on RCS stuff for the Project module. Being fed into Google, this means that the Drupal mentors can now place private comments and supporting votes there.

Given that there are a good number of comments on some of the other proposals in this group, I'm still wondering if there is something I can do to spread the word and get more input from the greater public. After all, work on the Project module severely affects the great majority of drupal.org users, and getting rid of CVS as a hard dependency should really be discussed in the wider community. So do communicate your opinions about my application, its benefits for Drupal, its chances to get elected, its shortcomings, challenges, etc. ...I'm listening.

Hello, all,

I posted a proposal for integrating some of the functionality exposed through Google's APIs into Drupal:

http://drupal.org/node/128258

Cheers,

Bill