Joomla 10th anniversary with GSoC

Joomla has a long history of participating at GSoC and we are proud that 2017 is our 10th anniversary participating in this fantastic program.

GSoC was started by Google 12 years ago in an effort to bring Open Source projects and students together. Joomla has participated in all but 2 of the editions, making the project one of the major long term participants of the program.

The long standing partnership between GSoC and Joomla has allowed countless features to find their way into the Joomla core and many previous students have gone on to become long time contributors to the Joomla project which is something that Joomla works hard on.
One of the greatest success stories is that of Joomla GSoC team leader, Puneet Kala. Puneet started contributing to Joomla as a student 4 years ago and has gone on to be an integral and very active player in the Joomla community, we also have seen three GSoC students from 2016 become mentors in 2017 and most of the other students are still actively contributing to Joomla.

It is not just the people that have stood the test of time in this partnership,  Joomla participated in the first GSoC in 2006 and many of the projects from that year can still be found in the code base including :-

  • Joomla Version Control System by Alek Andreev
  • Joomla - Media Manager by Mateusz Krzeszowiec
  • Pre-Processor API by Richard Allinson
  • Update System for Joomla by Samuel Moffatt

Over the years, Joomla has seen more than 80 GSoC students and 100s of mentors go through the program, and the benefits Joomla has seen during the program go far beyond just code contributions, as the strict time table helps the project to find direction and come to agreements faster, a small sample of these are listed below :-

  • Multi-Language associations component
  • Full frontend editing
  • Joomla Accessibility
  • JavaScript / Unit / System Tests
  • Template Manager
  • Webservices

The Joomla project is extremely thankful that Google has made all this possible!
Without GSoC the Joomla project would have a very different landscape and we look forward to continuing to work with Google to carve out the project’s future in the coming years.


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