Google Summer of Code 2009

This Summer Allan Walker has been a Mentor for the Google Summer of Code Joomla! program. The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers student developers an opportunity to participate in writing code for various open-source software programs.

Joomla! is one of these platforms, and during the summer of 2009 approx 19 students have taken on projects writing code to enhance the Joomla! platform. Being a mentor to a project, and a co-mentor to a second project, has been a great learning experience. Being able to support the students and watch the projects evolve is a rewarding experience, with recent final evaluations having taken place in which both of the students we were involved with have passed with flying colours.

Our main student this year was Edvard Ananyan, who has written a component for Joomla! which creates a "Working Copy" of your Joomla! website, and allows you to update this, and then syncronise or update the original site. This functionality is perfect for live sites that are under constant development. Rather than update your live site, simply use the "Child" copy, which can be run locally or on another domain, and then sync your changes back to the live site. Edvard's webex showing the final work can be viewed here. Edvard has passed the final evaulations and we wish him all the best for his development in the future.

Our second project which we were co-mentoring on was done by Victor Carbune. Victor's work focussed on building "Version Control" for Joomla! articles. Features such as "Roll-back" and "HTML Compare" are all present in this powerful versioning system for Joomla!... you can even see when someone else is editing the article.. and watch their text show in real time!

Victor has a webex presentation which highlights his work this summer and as with Edvard, has passed his final evaulations for the GSoC program this year. Personally I would like to thank both of them for a great effort, and it has been a rewarding experience for us to get more involved with the GSoC team for this year, and follow the students work.