Plone's Summer of Code has begun

After having proposals accepted by the Plone Foundation four university students have started working on improving Plone, thanks to funding from Google.

The Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers students generous stipends to write code for various open source software projects during their summer holidays. This is the fifth year Plone has participated in the programme and has accepted four projects, listed below.

AJAXIFY PloneFormGen form editing

by Nenad Mancevic (Manca), mentored by Steve McMahon (SteveM).

PloneFormGen is a very popular add-on product for Plone that allows content editors to create very powerful forms for managing user interaction.  This project will make the FormGen editing process more dynamic and even easier to use by  introducing a new jQuery powered front-end for creating and modifying forms.

Core tiles development

by Israel Saeta Pérez (dukebody), mentored by Martin Aspeli (optilude).

Deco is a revolutionary page composition system heavily based on semantic HTML and middleware software (either WSGI or using a post-publication hook) being developed by a group of Plone core developers with the hope of including it in Plone 5. The underlying Deco architecture, based on the concepts of panels and tiles, needs to be supplemented with a set of core tiles  such as images, videos, navigation etc,. in order to design useful pages.  This project aims to implement these tiles and continue the development of the tiles, blocks and page management backends.

Simplifying the Plone TTW theme customization experience

by David Bain (pigeonflight), mentored by David Glick (davisagli).

The experience of creating or customizing a Plone theme needs to be simplified. This project aims to simplify the experience of through the web (TTW) theme customisation and integrate it into our existing theming story.  This aims to replace the existing customisation tools with a single unified tool that makes life easier for skinners.

CMIS for Plone (cmis4plone)

by Leilei Zhu, mentored by Eric Steele (esteele) and Weblion.

The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard defines away for applications to work with one or more Content Management repositories/systems. This project is about developing a useful subset of this specification to increase interoperability between Plone and other CMSes. This follows on from the hugely successful work done in last year's Summer of Code by Chelsea Bingel and Michael Mulich, also mentored by the Weblion team at Penn State University.

These projects are hugely useful for the Plone and the open source community in general, more news will be posted here in due course but following http://planet.plone.org is the best way to keep completely up to date with progress on these projects.