Joomla! Google Summer of Code™ 2009: Lots to Shout About

The Joomla! project was thrilled to sponsor 18 Google Summer of Code students for 2009, and we are pleased to report that 16 (89%) successfully completed their projects. Most of the projects were based on ideas generated by the Joomla! community, and our community seems to be very excited about the results.

Our two primary goals for Google Summer of Code 2009 are to (1) develop relationships with student developers that will encourage them to continue working in the project; and (2) add features and functionality to the Joomla! CMS. Our participation in Google Summer of Code 2009 was very successful on both fronts.

Relationship to the Project

Several of our students this year were already contributing to Joomla! prior to participating in the program, and the Google Summer of Code experience has only strengthened that relationship. For example, one of our students, in addition to completing his project, is now a leader in the release of the next Joomla! version. At least two students (so far) have officially joined project working groups, and several others have contributed to the project over and above their Google Summer of Code projects. Many other students have also expressed interest in continuing the development of their code beyond the program timeframe.

This year, at the end of the term, we gave each student the opportunity to present a webinar where they could demonstrate their project to the community. Even though it was a lot of extra work, more than half the students did this. The results were excellent, and the students did really good, concise, focused presentations. We recorded and linked to the webinars on our site so that anyone in the community who is interested in the Google Summer of Code work can simply watch a short webinar to see an actual demonstration of the projects.

Using the Code

There are three ways the code from Google Summer of Code projects can be used within the Joomla! CMS. In some cases, some or all of the code will be incorporated directly into the core codebase for the upcoming Joomla! version 1.6. In other cases, the code has been published as an extension that can be downloaded and used by any Joomla! user on their website. The third method is that the code will be used as a basis for further work.

Some students have combined two of the methods above, for example, producing an extension for the current version 1.5 and making the code available for the core in our version 1.6.

More Information

We invite you to visit our Joomla! Community site for more information about the different projects and what was accomplished, and to download the code.


By Mark Dexter, Joomla! Project