Well, I think it is time to blog. My mentors recommend it and I will do it frequently. May 1st and 2nd were holidays in my country, so I had four complete days to relax and study about Joomla and other stuff related to my GSoC project. According to the timeline I included in my application, May 7th is my deadline to read documentation and define the scope of the project, so I think I am OK until now, of course I need to have a conversation with Neri and Amy (my mentors). I will make a summary of my activities this long weekend:

- I asked Mrs. Wikipedia about Bibtex and learnt more about it. I also visited http://www.bibtex.org where I could see there are interesting tools around this popular format. In order to have a good idea about the "state of the art", I tried three of them: BibShare, Bib2x and Joomla Bibtex (http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,1766/Itemid,35/, honestly, I did not know about the existence of this extension). I also installed one of the included in my application: Bibliography Module for Drupal. I could not install the ones for Plone, as at home I do not have access to an Internet connection and cybers with good bandwidth in my area are sweet dreams (I had a Drupal installer).
    * BibShare is a plug-in for Microsoft Word 2003 that includes functionality for administer sets of bibliographic references and automates the process of citing them and write the always present "Bibliography section" at the end of the document. It allows to customize the way those references are written (like the order and format of fields, separators, etc.). It does not include preconfigured formats like APA or MLA but the provides the user the way to configure them manually. BibShare can import references in BibTex format and allows to search references by author and keywords in the local machine and in a remote server (functionality I could not test due to my bandwidth constraints).
    * Joomla Bibtex is a component for Joomla 1.0.x which administers sets of bibliographic references that can be provided in BibTex format. It has a simple approach: the front-end just shows the list of bibliographic references which is slightly customizable and the administrative interface has a big form with all the possible fields (for all kind of references). Nice component!!
    * Bibliography module is an extension for Drupal focused again in the management of bibliographic references. It is highly customizable and allows the import and export of references in BibTex, EndNote Tagged and XML formats. It integrates very well with Drupal so you can add a new reference as if you were adding a new page or article. Citing styles like APA, MLA, IEEE and CSE are supported.

- My experience working in research centers allowed to know a little about their activities, habits and stuff like formats for storing bibliographic references (BibTex) and software tools like LateX. Unfortunately, I have never used LateX, however I think that trying it would help me more in the process of introduce myself in the world of research and papers. In this week, I will install LateX and ask about the process of citing a bibliographic references (I saw in a page that is easy: ~\cite{key} and that's right) and why not, learn to use it. I discussed with my mentor about the way of implementing the inline citing plug-in for TinyMCE. Two approaches were proposed:
    * BibShare approach
         Toolbar with option "Cite", a window for entering a keyword to search the cite, the cite is found and shown in some formats, the user selects the right entry and the right text is written in the document. This approach can be precise as the user ensures the right cite is written, but I personally do not like the idea of too many clicks and dialogs.
    * The other approach
         The user writes something like \cite{keyword} (similar to LateX syntax) and the editor immediately and automatically replaces it with the content of the cite . Those days, I will be thinking in the possible problems and scenarios of this method.
    By the way, comments and feedback are welcome.

- During this weekend, I also read about Joomla development. http://dev.joomla.org/content/view/12/52/ is a great page to start. I found information about how to write a component for Joomla, the Joomla 1.5 API Reference (which I downloaded), Joomla development cycle and the FAQs. I really enjoyed reading the FAQ about security as I assisted some time ago to a conference about this topic focused in web applications. Writing a component for Joomla 1.5 is really easy and the published tutorial is straightforward.

- Finally I could talk with my mentor and we have considered two ideas related to the component:

• To use the "other approach" for TinyMCE plug-in
• To include support for EndNote and XML in the component
• To include support for RDF

- So my tasks for this week are:

    * Read about how to include RDF support.
    * Install and try LateX.
    * Read about EndNote and XML formats for bibliographic references.
    * Refresh my knowledge in DHTML (I got an excellent book for this).
    * Define better the requirements of the component based on my conversation with Neri.
    * Install Plone and try AT Research Project and CMF Bibliography (I will do it later as I consider Plone installation is not easy).