Successful Google Summer of Code 2016 Projects

Plone advances, thanks to GSoC 2016 students and their projects.

Steve and Prakhar sporting the 2016 GSoC gear

Google Summer of Code ("GSoC") is an annual international program open to university students in which Google awards stipends to all students who successfully complete a free and open-source software  project.

The Plone community is proud to announce three successful projects were completed for GSoC 2016. 

  • ZhenSheng (Jensen) Jiang, from China, worked on ftw.book, a Plone add-on created by 4teamwork, a Swiss Plone service provider.  The ftw.book add-on creates printable book PDFs using LaTeX processing. Jensen was mentored by Bernd Kulawik.

    • Jensen's GSoC project tasks included:

      • creating a new content type allowing the user to choose a book-like publication having several authors, such as proceedings and conference reports
      • improving code quality by writing test code and improving test coverage.
      • begin migrating the add-on to Plone 5 (the 4teamwork company continues this migration work)
      • begin integrating BibTeX support into the add-on; this work continues, based on Jensen's research; this work will improve usability for scientific purposes
    • Jensen’s work was very focused and productive
  • Prakhar Joshi, from India, worked on improvements to collective.easyform, a Plone add-on that lets users easily create web forms. Easyform is the modern successor to the venerated PloneFormGen add-on, whose original author, Steve McMahon, mentored Prakhar.

    • Prakhar's accomplishments included:

      • migrating Easyform to Plone 5
      • dramatically expanding the Easyform's test coverage and code quality
      • begin creating tools to convert PloneFormGen forms to Easyform; this work required bringing PloneFormGen feature parity to Easyform
    • Prakhar did a tremendous job of engaging with the Plone community during the project, a key goal of GSoC 

All three GSoC students were offered sponsorship by the Plone Foundation to travel to Boston for the Plone Digital Experience 2016 conference. Prakhar's schedule allowed him to attend and present his work to an enthusiastic audience.

Matthew Wilkes has been coordinating the GSoC efforts for the Plone community for many years. The Plone Foundation Board expresses its gratitude to him on behalf of the entire Plone community for having managed this very important project.

We also truly appreciate the time and effort of our GSoC students and their mentors in continuing to move Plone forward.

On to 2017!