I’m Alexandra, studying Software Engineering MSc at University Politehnica of Bucharest. Among my passions there are programming and design, so I think this project is a best fit for me because as it has some parts of each. I’m going to do my best in GSoC 2018, making the user component better and more exciting. Last but not least, I have some of the best mentors, Benjamin Trenkle, Nuno Lopez, Allon Moritz and Tobias Zulauf.

About the project

As the title says, I am going to improve the users component by adding the possibility to make the profile of a user public so that it can be shown in the site. There will be two more views in the site, one with the public profile and one with the list of users. In addition, I will refactor the component’s code in order to make it adhere to the coding standards of Joomla! 4.

My mentors and I had meetings in order to establish the requirements of the project and to discuss the implementation. I wrote, a timeline document that also includes some technical aspects. I will start the implementation with the administrator part, then continue with the two views.

We decided to enrich the public profile with more useful information by adding some custom fields in the user component. The exact fields will be discussed at a later stage of the project.

The link to the GitHub repository is here.

Community bonding

During the community bonding period I met my GSoC 2018 Joomla! colleagues and Puneet Kala told us the important things we have to do and to know. Some important links are:

• Subteams page: link
• JDOCS main page and account creation page
• Coding standards page and code sniffer link, code sniffer repo link
• Articles from previous year: link. This year articles will be published here
• Example of meeting report: link.

Development environment

I have setup my development environment during the last month and although I faced some difficulties with the CodeSniffer and xdebug, in the end all got out the right way. I am using:

• PhpStorm as IDE
• with Mamp Pro for the DB
• Git through ssh. There are 2 branches:
  • master that is up to date with 4.0-dev and with the staging
  • staging that has a stable version of my work and will be merged into master. This is the branch to which I will make PRs.
• Installed the CodeSniffer in PhpStorm
• Setup xdebug in PhpStorm (I resolved some issues by using Mamp Pro instead of Mamp). Some useful links here: link, link,

Furthermore, I researched the Access Levels and checked out the content component in order to understand how I should use them. A nice video about the concept of access levels is this one: video.

To keep in mind:
The three principles that drive Joomla! are Love, Respect, Commitment.

What I learned during the community bonding period is that the joomlers are awesome and  passionate people that dedicate their time to the project without asking something other than the above principles being respected.

Next

I will have one or two meetings a week with my mentors in order to keep them updated with my work, implement the administrator part and the views. Before starting with the views I will make some mockups and post it in a new blog post. And then I need your feedback!

So stay tuned!