Google Summer of Code 2006 Allocations

Google have offered to sponsor three students with $5000 each to work on Plone during this year's Summer of Code.

The Plone Foundation was in the running for this year's "Google Summer of Code":http://code.google.com/soc for the first time. We received 12 strong applications, from very enthusiastic and capable students. In the end, we were allocated three places, which went to the highest-rated applications as voted for by the potential mentors. Although we had hoped to get a few more, we are immensely grateful to Google for the opportunity to improve Plone and integrate a few new faces into the Plone community. The winners were: Hanno Schlichting (mentored by Alec Mitchell): New Zope3 based internationalization/localization infrastructure -- Hanno, one of our most prolific contributors and master of the 'svn merge', will be working in improving Plone's i18n architecture by incorporating cutting-edge Zope 3 technologies. Markus Fuhrer (mentored by Martin Aspeli): "Plone Content Rules Engine":/products/plone/roadmap/157 -- Markus, a new face, will work on building the infrastructure and UI to allow portal administrators to define build that affect content being created or modified, in a similar vein to how Outlook and other mail clients allow the user to define rules on incoming mail. Pete Rosales (mentored by Dorneles Tremea): "Portlets engine based on PlonePortlets and Viewlets":/products/plone/roadmap/118 -- Pete, another newcomer, will continue the work begun at the Archipelago Sprint on building a next-generation portlets engine for Plone 3. Unfortunately, we also had to see several great applications go. It is our hope that the people below will be able to find alternative sources of funding or otherwise be able to continue their work. People who are interested in sponsoring this work are encouraged to "contact":/support the plone-developers mailing list in the first instance, or the individuals below. Tim Hicks (would-be mentor "Whit" Morris): Integration of Componentized Weblog/Syndication Technology into Plone -- Tim, who's been involved in Quills and wrote fat/basesyndication, delivered a very strong application that missed the target with the narrowest of deadlines. We campaigned to get an extra place for Tim, but Google were unfortunately unable to do so. Stephan Richter (would-be mentor Martijn Pieters) : Enhancing ZCML to better suit Plone -- Stephan, one of the most senior developers of Zope 3, offered to work on improving ZCML to better to support local sites, as well as on other improvements. This is an important problem, which we will need to solve eventually. Martin Fabian Kochem (would-be mentor David Convent): Contextual help system -- David Convent, Dennis Munishoff and Jonathan Lewis begun some very important work at the Archipelago Sprint working on a contextual, in-portal help system for Plone. Martin Fabian wanted to help with his, and looked to be an ideal candidate. Will Parks (would-be mentor Jonah Bossewitch): Inbound feed syndication -- Will was the very first student to contact the SoC team, and originally had two proposals: polishing off CMFEditions, and working on inbound RSS syndication. The original idea was for Tim and Will to work together on building a world-class syndication solution for Plone. Steven Haddox (would-be mentor Nate Aune): Recurring Events -- Steve planned to expand his recurring events product to make it more genereally useful, and possibly get recurrence built into ATContentTypes' ATEvent type. Subsequently, Steve has started work on a new codebase called EventRecur, which promises to deliver the original benefits. Tim Cranfield (would-be mentor Schuyler Duveen): Content Visualisation -- Tim was interested in exploring methods of visualising the linkages between content in the CMS, in order to make the site easier to navigate and understand. Gunther Dressel (would-be mentor Jodok Batlogg): Plone Player -- Gunther wanted to work on improving the Plone's multimedia story, by building a well-integrated Flash-based streaming media player. Honourable mention also goes to **Ramon Navarro Bosch**, who submitted three applications in the end, including one to improve Plone's transformation and indexing story, and **Ernesto Rivera**, who was interested in working on pluggable syndication alongside Tim Hicks and Will Parks. Although these applications were never assigned to mentors, we encourage Ramon and Ernesto to get involved in the community should they be interested in taking this forward. The SoC team would like to thank all the applicants for their hard work. And remember - if we impress Google this year, our chances of getting more allocatios next year, should Summer of Code run again, would be greatly improved.