GSoC Brainstorming

New Ideas

These are new and not fully fleshed-out ideas for the Google Summer of Code. Please note that these ideas are not directly eligible for GSoC as they are. They can be used as the starting point for a proper proposal, though, or for your inspiration if you'd like to submit a project idea of your own.

• Integrate Aloha Editor, replacing FCKeditor as the "advanced" (WYSIWYG) editor in Geeklog.
  As discussed, this is probably not enough work to keep a student busy for 3 months. For a proper GSoC project, this would need to be expanded.
• Go Semantic Web. This is somewhat vague: Use available build blocks such as Apache Stanbol (see Report from the IKS Workshop in Amsterdam) and the Aloha editor (see Semantic Editor) to add semantic information to articles. Possible uses: SEO, better linking between articles (also see What's Related). Student should have a better idea of what "semantic web" is than the author of these sentences ...
• E-Mail Subsystem: Geeklog sometimes has to send out a lot of emails. Instead of sending them all at once (and running into timeouts), we could queue them and send them out in batches. This queue should allow for other job types as well.
• Multi-site Setup: Out-of-the-box support to run several websites off of one codebase. There's a hack for that, but it's a pain for upgrades and has unresolved issues with shared resources like files (favicon, XML sitemap, ...) and resources (images in articles, user photos, ...).
• Staging Support: When making significant changes to a site, you don't want to do those on your "live" site, possibly disrupting its service. So you would set up a second site with pretty much the same setup as the original and make the changes there first. How could Geeklog (possibly the install script?) support such a setup? E.g. syncing changes back and forth.
• Admin toolbox: A collection of mini-plugins for admin tasks (e.g. reset stats, change a default setting for all users, etc.). Should have super easy install, e.g. just drop (upload?) a file in a predefined directory.
• Migration from/to other systems is always a hot topic. How could we make that easier? We don't want to lock in users into Geeklog, so both import and export should be supported. Things like the mtimport format and CMIS come to mind.
• Multi user blogs: Geeklog can handle blogs of several users, actually, if you give one topic to a user then it is almost unlimited. There are a few existing discussions on the forum and also feature requests concerning the improvement of user blogs. E.g. read only topics, using GL for a large site with many users. Basically it is a native function of GL but it need some improvement.
• Switching a site to Read-only mode: Sometimes, it's time to close a site. You could take it offline entirely, but that would remove (possibly still useful) content from the web. Instead, it would be nice to have an option that disables all options to log in, sign up, add or edit content, etc.
• Implement an Undo Function: Currently, as soon as you click on "save" for an object (story, block, user, ...) the old value or status of the object is gone and overwritten with whatever you changed last. It would be nice to have the ability to go back to a previous version when needed.

Leftover Ideas

This is a list of other ideas for projects for the Google Summer of Code that have been tossed around in previous years but did not seem so important at this point in time.

• WebDAV API
• Google Translation API
• Implement Open Web Analytics
• Implement a theme based on the YUI CSS Foundation Libraries

If you plan to apply for one of these projects you should provide a good use case. Otherwise, these ideas could serve as a starting point for your own project idea.