 In 2006 we received 90 project proposals for the Google Summer of Code program (SoC) . The team of mentors selected 9 projects for mentoring. Out of these 9 projects Google allocated the first 6. Google will provide a stipend of 5,000 USD to each student developer, of which 4,500 USD goes to the student and 500 USD goes to Joomla! project. With 6 accepted applications this adds up to a 30,000 USD investment over a three-month period !
The 3 students that haven't been allocated by Google have been given the opportunity to work on their project and be treated in the same way as the other 6 funded projects, the only difference will be that they won't get paid. This means they will get the same press coverage, will have someone assigned to as a mentor and the results of these projects will be included into Joomla! 2.0. Two of them have accepted and have also been invited to join in for the ride.
The summer of code projects are targetted almost fully towards the next major release, Joomla! 2.0. To faciliate and manage this effort we have setup a seperate team and project structure. Community developers with specialised expertise in the different accepted projects have been asked to mentor the students and the overall project and team management will be in the hands of Wilco Jansen (S&G working group member). Louis Landry (core team member) will act as Wilco's "buddy" filling in and providing technical and project related feedback when needed.
Project goals
The Summer of Code 2006 is heavily targetted towards our next major version, Joomla! 2.0. Projects where choosen based on the main features for this version.
The goal of the Joomla! 2.0 is to create a stable, professional, well supported and extremely easy and intuitively to use CMS with a simple template system and driven by a simple yet powerfull extension API.
The framework created for Joomla! 1.5 will serve as the basis, allowing a easy transition for developers that's are already using it. It's important to understand that in order to achieve this goal the core architecture of Joomla! will need to be completely redesiged, resulting in major backwards compatibility breakages.
Project results
This section has been added after we have successfully ended the Joomla! Google Summer Of Code project. All projects described below have been evaluated (end-term was September 5 2006), all students have received a positive evaluation. The total program evaluation can be found in the complete summer of code end-report.
Project structure
We have setup a seperate project team to manage the development of the summer of code project. While mentors are responsible for the individual projects. A project manager will be in charge of the overall coordination and followup. We also appointed a co-project lead "buddy" who can fill in when needed and most importantly coach the project leader if technical decisions need to be made.
If all goes well, the SOC project will lead to some exiting new stuff for Joomla! 2.0. The structure will allow us to widen our focus behind the main summer of code tasks and will make sure that he work done at the soc project level will be in sync of the Joomla! general project management and connect to the final Joomla! roadmap.
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