GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Summer of Code 2011

WordPress

Web Page: http://codex.wordpress.org/GSoC2011

Mailing List:

WordPress is a PHP-based open source (GPLv2) web publishing platform that has been around for almost 8 years. Led by Matt Mullenweg, the project currently has four lead developers, half a dozen additional committers, and hundreds of contributing developers. WordPress is translated into over 70 languages, and is used by over 35 million people around the world to publish web content. In addition to our web app, we will also accept applications for projects related to our mobile apps (iOS, Blackberry, Android, Nokia, Windows Mobile), supported plugins such as BuddyPress and bbPress, and community tools like GlotPress. We have more than 20 mentors pulled from the core contributor community ready to mentor GSoC projects this year.

We are most interested in working with students who are already familiar with the WordPress codebase, and will give preference to those who have submitted at least one core patch or created one plugin for the wordpress.org plugin repository. This helps us ensure that no time will be lost at the beginning of the project to learning the basic coding practices in WordPress, and that you'll know you enjoy working with our code and community. If you haven't submitted code in these ways before, you are encouraged to do so before submitting your application, even if it is only a trivial patch or plugin.

Note: We ask that our students produce a functioning project by midterm, so the second half of gsoc can be spent on testing, revision, ui improvements, and integration with core, if it turns out well. Please plan your timeline accordingly. 

 

Things to get you started:

  • Our ideas page on our own Codex (includes list of potential mentors).
  • Our developer mailing list, wp-hackers.
  • Our active development cycle blog: wpdevel.
  • Our official announcements blog at wordpress.org.
  • Our Trac, for tracking all development tickets (currently working on milestone 3.2).
  • Our developement IRC channel at irc.freenode.net, channel #wordpress-dev.
  • Our GSoC-specific IRC channel at irc.freenode.net, channel #wordpress-gsoc.
  • Our application template.

 

We're very much looking forward to your proposal. To increase your chances in this competitive environment, it is recommended that you run your project idea past the developer community and/or specific potential mentors in IRC *before* you apply to get feedback that can improve your application's chances. We will be hosting scheduled chats in IRC the week before applications are due, and will post a schedule of the dates/times here once it is available. 

 

Projects

  • Enhanced Emails The notification emails are a rare case where WordPress is behind the times - there is a bunch of plugins allowing to send HTML emails, but it definitely should be a core feature. It is my goal to provide a working and customizable solution.
  • Extending WordPress Webservices WordPress Web Services allow you to modify your blog remotely. WordPress supports XMLRPC And Atom protocols. Most of the clients use XMLRPC methods including WordPress mobile clients. However the current XMLRPC implementation have some limitation. The goal of this project to extend XMLRPC functionalities of WordPress.
  • Language Packs The goal of this idea is to separate tasks of plugin developers, core contributors and translators, automating more tasks. This task should be divided in two separate projects. The first is in the GlotPress side, which is the bridge between plugin repository and GlotPress. The second is in the plugin side. The bridge is in the responsibility of WordPress.org team and the plugin project is in my responsibility.
  • learn.wordpress.org WordPress doesn't have an official handbook or a tutorial resources website. Even though the platform is very popular and used by a lot of people, there will always be people that will find hard to read/understand Codex articles and will search for books on topics they couldn't catch up. So the idea I would like to work on, is a new learning resource for WordPress community, that will offer courses, assignments and basic "certification" for everyone who wants to learn WordPress.
  • LocalStorage drafts backup My vision is that at the end of this project, a WordPress user will not care at if any time during him/her writing a post on his blog, his Internet connection goes down.Editing files (and posts) on the client and using localStorage to save drafts when the Internet connection goes down can make everyone’s experience with WordPress a lot more safe and maybe a little more enjoyable.
  • Refresh the Android App UI The UI for existing features could be more user-friendly. e.g. a dashboard-kind of an interface. This would lead to quick blogging on the go and remove unnecessary steps while performing basic operations like posting a new post, pictures and videos. Removing the current tab-kind of an interface and bringing in a grid interface like the current Twitter and Facebook app. The UX would also have to be improved. This means large buttons, easy to browse-interface and smooth graphic flows too.
  • Template Versioning Using Subversion I propose the creation of an interface for version control systems for the templates which integrates the display of revision information into the theme editor page. This core functionality will then be extended to include support to display diffs across versions. Upon creation of this interface, adapter plugins will be created for various VCS including a custom post based VCS using the WordPress database.
  • WordPress File Uploader Upgrade My proposed project is to upgrade WordPress’s existing Flash-based multi-file uploader, integrating an existing open source project with the current APIs to provide a more modern solution to file uploading (HTML 5, Drag-and-Drop, Canvas processing, etc - based on browser support).
  • WordPress Move WordPress Move will be a straightforward but also a feature-rich project that fits every kinds of installations just fine and makes the whole migration process a piece of cake for everyone. It will only require installing a plugin on the current WordPress installation and providing the necessary information requested. This tool will help the user to migrate to another server or change the domain name of the current installation.
  • WP Document Revisions WP Document Revisions is a document management and version control plugin for the popular content management system, WordPress. Built for time-sensitive and mission-critical projects, teams can collaboratively edit files of any format — text documents, spreadsheets, images, sheet music… anything — all the while, seamlessly tracking the document’s progress as it moves through your organization’s existing workflow.