Congratulations on being accepted as a Google Summer of Code student for 2008 with the Joomla! project! We are very excited to have you on board with us and are eager to work with you. It is our hope that this will be a great experience for all involved. We hope that you be challenged and will be able to learn and develop your skills as a software developer and open source contributor. We hope that you will gain valuable experience that will be helpful for you in the future. We hope that you will have fun contributing to an open source project and producing something that will be appreciated by many.

My name is Ian MacLennan. Myself and Wilco Jansen are the SoC administrators for the Joomla! project. If you have any questions or concerns at any point during the project that your mentor is unable to answer, please feel free to contact us. We are here to make sure that everything goes smoothly both for you, your mentor, and the Joomla! project.

If you haven't already read the student guidelines, please do so. This provides some information about the expected dates on Google's end.

In order for this program to operate well, communication is key. In the near future we will be releasing a reporting schedule that you will be expected to follow to keep us up to date on the progress of your project. This will be an important aspect of your midterm and final evaluation.

You will note that students are not scheduled to begin their GSoC projects until May 26th. Use the time until then to communicate with your mentor, to become familiar (if you aren't already) with the Joomla! community, the Joomla! codebase and other material that you will need to study to get up to speed with in order to be successful this summer.

In order to get started, please email me and include the following:

• A picture of yourself
• Your Skype ID (please register on Skype if you haven't done so already)
• Your Joomla! forum nickname (please register if you haven't done so already)

As a final note, we have chosen you because we believe that you have creative ideas, that you are talented and able and because you have a great deal of potential that will benefit the Joomla! project. We can't wait to see the product of your effort! The summer promises to be a lot of hard work, but we believe it will be worth it and that everybody involved will find it a very rewarding experience.