Section 1

I am doing GSoC 2009 with Joomla! for developing a taxonomy extension for Joomla! 1.6. I was contacted by Mark (program admin) on 14th March, a day before conflict resolution IRC meeting and informed that I was selected, and was greeted into Joomla! development. I am glad to work on something new this time. I was also informed about the two would-be mentors, and I started talking with them within couple of days. 

Section 2

We have had two meetings in skype (on 22 and 28 April) so far, and many things apart from introduction, culture, demography, FOSS and of course weather have been discussed. Also it was decided to blog (weekly), talk over skype (weekly) and commit (thrice weekly) regularly. Accordingly the blog will be of the following format.

• High lights of the week.
• Short anecdotes of events happened during that week.
• Finally, technical aspects, to-do and have-done lists, snippets of chat logs. 

Anyone interested in merely following the project could skip the first two sections. Time to move on to section 3.

Section 3

The lists to follow 

1. Community page (sort of a homepage for all the links) : https://community.joomla.org/gsoc2009/gartheeban-ganneshapillai.html

2. Forum thread : https://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=231&t=398626&start=0 

3. GSoC posts on personal website : http://joomla.theebgar.net

Have-done list:

1. The accounts are set up at the following places :

https://community.joomla.org/

http://www.theartofjoomla.com/ 

http://labs.joomla.org/developer/

http://joomlacode.org/

http://groups.google.com/group/joomla-2009-gsoc-mentors--students/

https://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=231

 2. SVN acount is setup, locally tested through IDEs (Netbeans and Eclipse) and Tortoise Client (I sometimes prefer to work outside IDEs, of course just to check the updates should we wait till the bulky IDE loads)

3.  Joomla! 1.6 is checked out from http://joomlacode.org/svn/joomla/development/trunk/

4.  Learning Joomla Extension Development was read, sample codes were checked.

5.  Formulated the basic architecture plan and discussed with the mentors.

6.  Followed webinars on using IDE, by the way I find this series of webinars very interesting and useful. Must make sure to attend all webinars.

Currently In Progress:

1. Reading Mastering Joomla 1.5 Extension and Framework Development

2. Preparing an architecture document

3. Following the codes of existing extensions and libraries to see the patterns.

Short term to dos:

1. Complete Architecture plan in week

2. Complete the sections relevant to my paper (I am working on a paper related to taxonomy design)

3. Start coding the API framework

4. Emailing rob or hannes , following the thread  : http://groups.google.com/group/joomla-dev-cms/browse_thread/thread/c92c02ee7fba5131

Current Plan:

1. Implement backend API as a libraary

2. Admin section as component

3. Cumulus and other tools for presentation as modules

4. Looking for ways to integrate taxonomy fields into content creation forms and others via plugins (also for displaying them later along with content)

I am looking forward to cover more in the next post, with less writing (of course isn't it efficient) especially in the architecture design and development with plugin problems.

PS: Also getting used to type correctly without typos. I have a quite good typing speed and I am used to make mistakes at that speed. I have been used to use Window s Live Writer and similar tool from KDE to post blogs, or rather write blogs, and now when I started to write blogs in Tinymce, it is giving me headache.