Nakul Ganesh S is pursuing his Bachelors Degree in Information Science Engineering at the National Institute Of Engineering in Mysore, India. He is proficient in C, C++, Javascript, and Ajax. Nakul has built Web sites for over six years with several years of PHP and MySQL experience. Joomla! is his "flagship" OSCMS and he has contributed the Amazon Widgit and Save Tube extensions. As a FOSS enthusiast, Nakul helps lead Obscura, a college open source group and hopes his participation in GSoC will help spread the spirit of open source in India.

Mentor: Deborah Susan Clarkson is from the San Francisco Bay area and is a creative type who holds BA Art and MA Multimedia degrees. Deborah's thesis project "3D Immersive Environment Using Stereoscopic HD Video" and her positive and helpful attitude uniquely qualify her as a mentor for this project. Deborah often performs pro bono Web development for nonprofits and fell in love with Joomla! when she discovered it. Her background in scripting languages has made working with Joomla! a natural fit.

I believe Web 2.0 really began with the WYSIWYG editor! Yeah, with the power to edit articles,documents and posts ,entire websites.Basically to put it in a sentence WYSIWIG editor has made the net more Dynamic than ever.And i'm going to take this one step ahead.I sure hope so

Images truly speak more than words.Imagine the capabilities if we could edit photos online,and that too within Joomla!.Well okay yeah,i agree this is not an entirely new thing;we've always been able to edit photos.But what  is new about this ? You may ask.

Let me break it upto you this way,i will give a simple breakup presentation  of what it is now with Images in Joomla! and what wil be there this spring ;)Managing Media (Photos) in Joomla! now :

Images can be uploaded via http upload or ftp ,and can be put in articles through the WYSIWYG editor ;

It can be resized (but lossy)

It can be given a border.

It can be linked. And of course can be aligned.

Hmm,i think thats about it !!

I just wanna list out some of the shortcomings ,right bout here

Its not always that you are going to put your Photo right off your Camera.Its probably larger than a Meg.Well,so what do you do then ?.........Haven't you all wondered if you could easily *Crop* of parts of an image whil editing an artilce without having to edit it and to upload it again.Besides you would need some software to do it too !!

Imagine this, you have to write an article right away and you're at your Granny's place which has a very old( I mean really old) box with just enough connectivity.Well as you've probably guessed you have no editing software there.Thats where this new component will come in handy.

If you're a linux user you probably will edit it in GIMP and upload it.But,i'm guessing here that not a lot of everyday common people are gonna be on Linux.From what i know there isn't a *GOOD* and *FREE* image editor,unless you already have one or are cash loaded to buy one or you're a leecher using a pirated one ;-)

It won't matter anymore,at least for Joomla! users this spring,I'm gonna put the Photo Editor BIGGIES outta business.

LOL!! I know !!

Nevertheless ,here are the things i can promise by the end of Summer ;-)

An Image Editor !

• Which can resize image wil very little or least loss.
• Crop parts of Images.
• Add Watermark.
• Write Captions/Titles on the Image.
• Add coll effects (Sepia,Greyscaling,etc)
• Copy and Merge Images.
• Convert from one format to the other.
• Get Photo Data.
• Yes,of course there are a lot more.(I'll update ASAP)
• I mean a lot more.

And all of this without even having to close the browser.This componenet will certainly not be just for the Admin,but or the Users too,giving them more control over the articles that they will publish.

Alongside this I will also be implementing a very new feature into Joomla! A browser based Flash Processor.I'm post more on this,sometime soon.Glad to keep you guys in Suspense :-)

Nakul Gan

 PS:I'm very new to blogging