Google’s Open Source offices have officially announced that there will be a Google Summer of Code Program this year. Because of the wild success of our projects with GSoC last year, the Joomla Community has again put together a team to mentor college / university students of any age for the summer. That team has already filled out the application for Google, and been approved by Google. This is happening, folks!
What’s on The Plate for This Year?
Last year had a major focus on the (then) Joomla Platform codebase. Six out of our seven projects were platform related. This year, we have almost the opposite so far in terms of project ideas. The CMS has quite a few more project ideas on our ideas list, which should mean great innovation and maybe some new features in the upcoming Joomla 3 releases. The CMS is an exciting place for people interested in working on innovative applications. New features like tagging and Bootstrap and new CMS only APIS have created a good infrastructure for new work and for extension developers to dig in and check out all the great new features available to them in the 3.0 series! Both being a student developer and mentoring will put you in the middle of exciting changes for 3.2, 3.5 and beyond.
Help Wanted
If you’re interested in helping with GSoC, mentoring a student, or you are a student, we’d love to hear from you. There are a few important ways that we need help this year. If you’re a programmer who just doesn’t have the time to take on mentoring a student and project (we’re all busy!) maybe you could just offer some assistance when a student has the need for some code to be tested by several different testers who can provide useful feedback.
If you are a programmer and you do have a bit of available time over the summer, we can always use more mentors. Even if you can’t commit to a full time mentoring position, just having someone available at the right time can make a difference. Just talk to us, we’ll find a way to work with your schedule and the time you have available. Of course, if you can commit to mentoring a project, we would love to hear from you too - don’t be shy!
Getting More Info
There’s a lot of information about GSoC out there, specific to Joomla and more general just for GSoC. Here’s a few links to help you out:
- GSoC
- Joomla GSoC
To get in contact with the GSoC team, send an email to gsoc [at] opensourcematters.org
We look forward to hearing from you soon!
