Google has announced the successful applicants for the 2009 Google Summer of Code, and WordPress is lucky enough to have eight students allotted to our open source project. It was a tough choice, since we had almost 60 applications to choose from. We’d like to thank all the students who applied, and we’re sorry we couldn’t take on more of you.
Developers, if you see these bright young things in the dev channel, please be your usual friendly, helpful selves. 
Everyone else, wish our students luck with their projects this summer, which promise to be challenging but awesome. Without further ado, I’m pleased to introduce the GSoC projects (in no particular order) and the students tackling them.
Justin Shreve, Extended WordPress Search Engine. Justin will be mentored by Andy Skelton. One of the complaints I hear over and over again is about the search engine, so this could have great benefit to WordPress core.
Rudolf Cheuk Sang Lai, Adding Photo Grouping by Album Functionality. This project will wind up being a piece of a larger media redux project for 2.9/3.0. Mark Jaquith is mentoring, and Noel Jackson will be a backup mentor.
Daryl Koopersmith, WYSIWYG theme editor/generator. This will allow users to create and edit themes without touching any code. Beau Lebens is the mentor on this project.
Michael Benedict Arul will be working on a similar project. Michael will be mentored by Andrew Ozz, since this project will be using jQuery. It’s our hope that having two students working on this idea separately will foster competition and allow us to compare approaches.
Daniel Larkin, Modified Preorder Tree Traversal (MPTT). Lead Developer Ryan Boren will be his mentor. This is Daniel’s second GSoC working on WordPress.
Diego Caro, a student from Chile, will also work on an MPTT project. Diego will be mentored by Thorsten Ott.
César Rodas, social and text processing algorithms for BuddyPress and MU as related to recommendation engines. Alex Shiels and Andy Peatling will co-mentor this project.
Anthony Cole, Event management with WordPress. Co-organizer of WordCamp Australia and New Zealand, Anthony will be working on a suite of plugins (or maybe just one or two out of a planned set, scope TBD) for event management/attendee networking that will be built on BuddyPress/MU/bbPress. We’ll use wordcamp.org as a test case, and release the final product to the community. Jake Spurlock will be mentoring, with Andy Peatling as backup.
Congratulations, guys*!
*Seriously, we didn’t get more than a couple of applications from female student developers. Where are all the geek girls?
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As promised, here are the results of the 24-hour has-patch marathon that was announced, begun and completed over the course of a few days last week (more on timing after the results). Results include activity from 8am Pacific time on Thursday, April 16, 2009 to 9am Pacific time on Friday, April 17, 2009.
Total number of patches committed to core: 44
Contributors whose old patches were committed: 9
Marathon contributors whose patches were committed: 13
Tickets closed: 102 (breakdown below)
- Fixed – 45
- Dupe – 16
- Wontfix – 10
- Invalid – 19
- Worksforme – 12
Tickets created: 20 [I guess not everyone got the memo that we were trying to close tickets. ]
Tickets reopened: 4
Number of testers who left comments in ticket threads: 10
Number of testing-specific comments: 18
These numbers are based on opening each ticket that registered activity during the marathon hours and counting the actual comments that indicated some testing of a patch. Contributions to philosophical discussions without a patch, while important, weren’t counted for this purpose. Nor were Trac notices that simply noted a ticket was being closed because it was a dupe, invalid, etc.
Top five contributors (committed patches): Denis-de-Bernardy, filosofo, nbachiyski, scohoust, simonwheatley
Top five testing feedback providers: shanef, Nicholas91, Denis-de-Bernardy, sivel, williamsba, mrmist (tie)
Given the short notice/last-minute nature of the marathon, I think we did pretty well. Granted, there were people who complained that two days wasn’t enough notice to clear their schedules, but let’s be honest, the 24-hour has-patch marathon was more of a rallying cry to help clean out Trac than a deadline based on anything specific. Patches are always welcome/encouraged, and now that the big features for 2.8 are mostly done, the lead devs will be able to spend more time reviewing Trac tickets and patches. Still, not too many people tested existing patches (or if they did, they failed to leave the requisite comment in the ticket threads). Testing patches is one of the easiest things you can do to help further development, since patches won’t be committed or rejected until they’ve been tested by several people.
As we get closer to the 2.8 release, jump into Trac any time and test a few patches (don’t forget to leave the feedback!) if you have time. If there’s a ticket you’re sick of seeing there, write a patch and ask your fellow contributors to test it and comment on the ticket thread. We’ll announce an official bug hunt soon (and yes, there will be more than two days’ notice), but the fact remains that addressing new bugs is easier if Trac isn’t clogged with old tickets. If you spot duplicate tickets, mark it a dupe, note the other ticket number in the comments and close the ticket. If you see one that is no longer relevant because the current code base fixes a problem reported several versions ago, mark it invalid, leave a comment and close the ticket. These simple housekeeping tasks may not seem like much, but they do help. Special props to Denis-de-Bernardy, who in addition to writing a couple of patches during the marathon and testing a few others, did a bunch of ticket maintenance like this, and cleared out a number of tickets.
Thank you to everyone who participated, and until the next marathon, happy patching and testing!
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