Community Idea

Overview: Selenium is a suite of tools to automate web app testing across many platforms. I idea is to enhance Simpletest to be able to integrate with Selenium and use it to run tests developed in simpletest via the browser instead of a the built in test browser which is currently being used. However we will still be able to use the built in browser. The main advantage is that we could start developing tests which will test the javascript within the system.

Description: Making changes to the current simpletest test suite to allow it to change its default browser intergration to sent the browser intergration tests to a real browser instead of a the basic PHP one that we currently have.

The main reason for doing this is to be able to build tests which test the javascript that is built for Drupal and make sure that it does not break. Not only will it run tests in Firefox, but can be configured to run in most browsers http://seleniumhq.org/about/platforms.html#browsers and also has been used to with other testing frameworks http://seleniumhq.org/about/platforms.html#testing-frameworks

Also changes would need to be made to SimpleTest when Selenium is not installed so that tests that are testing js can be skipped. Or basically tests can provide requirments that the testing suite needs and will not run it those needs are not meet.

Work may also need to be done on PIFR to allow it to publish which types of tests it can handle.

Also with the Selenium IDE can output code, so having it being able to output source code for SimpleTest would be a huge boone for Drupal as just about anyone could create tests. They would only need to be able to know how to use firefox and how to install an extension.

Mentors:

• Alex UA - will help with creating templates.
• randommentor1 - backup mentor, will help with coding standards, etc.
• ALocalMentor - a local mentor, who lives/works near the student and who will meet with the student in person at least two times over the course of the Summer of Code.

Difficulty: Medium (choose either easy, medium or hard)

Three big pains for me when working with drupal :
- the list of permissions (too long, easy to forget things, no way to categorize, filter stuff)
- the list of modules (often too long, hard to search through -every module name appears more times ...)
- the non-existing list / diagram of CCK types / fields (am I the only one UML / other modelling spoiled ?)

Notifying users of new content, events, actions is something that is common to enterprise level applications, social network or simply a blog. Notification can happen in many forms and via many mediums, some of the prominent ones being e-mail, instant messaging, SMS or live feed. Solutions uptill now have been separate and distant to each other, even though the problem is essentially the same, that is some message needs to be relayed to one of your user. The medium and carrier would differ and so would be the urgency and priority of delivery.

This is a proposal to bring Open Sound Control (OSC) capabilities to Drupal.

Open Sound Control (OSC) is a protocol for communication among computers, sound synthesizers, and other multimedia devices that is optimized for modern networking technology (see opensoundcontrol.org for more info)

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.

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

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:

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.

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

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.