Important Announcement

This is a public service announcement to all of the students who are interested in working on a Drupal project for this year's Summer of Code. If you are new to the community and are curious what the best way is to attract a great mentor to work with, the answer is pretty straight forward: submit a patch on Drupal.org. Creating patches for Drupal, or any of the many modules or themes that call drupal.org home, is the fastest way to gain "community karma", which could be precisely what leads to you getting the most awesome mentor possible. And, you'll need to know how to work with Drupal's issue tracking system (there are also instructions for using the issue queue) and patching in general, so you might as well get a head start now!

The best place to get started with patching is the Novice Issue Queue. There are enough bite size issues there that you should be able to easily find one that you can create a patch for in a few short hours. If you do post a patch, please let us know in the comments below.

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.

On the recommendation of Alex UA, I'm creating this post to generate a list of potential mentors for the 2009 GSoC. If you're interested in signing up, please post a comment in this discussion.