Summer of Code 2008

Geeklog was accepted to take part in the Google Summer of Code™ 2008. This page provides an overview of the 2008 activities.

What is it?

The Google Summer of Code™ is a program sponsored by Google where they pay students to develop open source software. In its third incarnation in 2007, Geeklog took part in the program for the first time and we have been accepted for 2008 again.

The following projects were accepted for the Google Summer of Code 2008 (also see the announcement on geeklog.net):

For Geeklog

• Improving the comments, Student: Jared Wenerd (Mentor: Michael Jervis)
• Improved Search, Student: Sami Barakat (Mentor: Randy Kolenko)
• Install script: Plugins and Migration, Student: Matt West (Mentor: Dirk Haun)
• Mailman Plugin, Student: Aman Parmani (Mentor: Blaine Lang)

For AptitudeCMS (formerly Geeklog 2)

• Mapping Plugin, Student: Dhairya Dnyanpal Dand (Mentor: Justin Carlson)
• Add Social Networking Features, Student: Bill Bushey (Mentor: Michael Tutty)

Project Ideas

This is a list of ideas for projects that we feel would add useful functionality to Geeklog but didn't make the cut for GSoC 2008:

For Geeklog 1.x

• Webservices revisited
• SWOT (Spam: Web of Trust)
• Implement a theme based on the YUI CSS Foundation Libraries
• Cross Site Alerting and Publication API
• Implement Open Web Analytics
• Core Notification Service
• Google Translation API
• Improve multilingual capabilities

There are also some leftover ideas from 2007.

For Geeklog 2

• Taxonomy and Tagging Plugin
• Continuous Builds
• Workflow Plugin
• Geeklog2 Syndication API
• Geeklog2 Anti-Spam "Solution"
• Media Plugin
• Social Plugin using Google's OpenSocial

Notes for Students

Required skills

Students interested in any of the above projects should have reasonable experience with PHP and some basic SQL knowledge. Being able to set up your own LAMP server (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) would probably help but isn't a prerequisite.

Background information

Please note that there are two versions of Geeklog currently under active development but that they share little other than the name and a few contributors.

• Geeklog 1.x (currently 1.4.1, with 1.5.0 "almost done") is the software you may have seen running websites such as Groklaw.
• Geeklog 2 is "the next generation" of Geeklog and has been rewritten from the ground up. There are no released versions of Geeklog 2 yet.

Geeklog 1.x was started back in the year 2000 and its code is still mostly procedural and it uses its own (thin) database abstraction layer. Geeklog 2, on the other hand, is fully object oriented and uses technologies such as MVC and design patterns.

So basically, you can choose between working on a system that is in wide use already or one that uses all the latest and greatest in technology but isn't quite ready for mainstream use yet. In either case, you would be helping the Geeklog community immensely.

License

Geeklog 1.x has been released under the GPLv2 (GNU General Public License, version 2). All code written for Geeklog 1.x projects should also be released under that same license.

No final decision has been made on the license for Geeklog 2. However, it will most likely not be the GPL but another OSI approved license in the spirit of the BSD license.

Contact

For all questions regarding Geeklog and the Summer of Code, please email us at contact-us(AT)lists.geeklog.net or use this web form.

You are also invited to join our Development Mailing List and say "Hi!"

Or you can hop on our IRC channel: #geeklog at irc.freenode.net and talk to us directly (some patience required - not everyone may be online there all the time).