This week’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) wrap up is from Matthew Lechleider at Drupal, a widely used content management system used for building websites.
Hello from the Drupal community. We're an open source content management system used to create some of the coolest websites in the world and we're delighted to highlight just a few of our Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2014 student projects. Not only did 12 students dedicate their summer contributing to Drupal, but most importantly they had fun. Many of the projects below may sound easy, but Drupal 8’s core architecture is a major upgrade from previous versions forcing many students to engineer code in our new systems.
Most students focused on porting frequently used modules to our upcoming version 8. Students such as Lucian Hangea from Romania worked on a vast array of functionality ranging from porting the Diff module with extensible new options to Jayesh Solanki from India who integrated Disqus comments. It is impressive to see contributions from students who are simply happy to be part of our open source community. We can only hope these talented young software geniuses stick around.
Shivanshu Agrawal from India not only created a working version of the Securesite module in Drupal 8 but also finished the Drupal 7 version port during his GSoC application phase. Thousands of users around the world wondered why Drupal 7 sites could not provide simple password authentication until a student made a simple change pushing the module from beta to stable.
Sachini Aparna Herath from Sri Lanka worked on adding support for schema.org mappings to Drupal 8. Helping websites and systems communicate in a standard way, schema.org enriches content allowing it to properly propagate the Internet. Because of Sachini, Drupal 8 site builders can seamlessly point/click schema.org markup to their sites using the RDF UI she built. Similar projects are available in previous versions of Drupal but not Drupal 8, making this project fairly difficult to accomplish in an early beta version.
Andrei-Marius Dincu from Romania ported XMLsitemap to Drupal 8. This module creates a sitemap which conforms to the sitemaps.org specifications and helps search engines more intelligently crawl a website and keep their results up to date. Not only did Andrei port xmlsitemap.module to our newest beta versions of Drupal 8, he continues to provide contributions to previous versions of the module and even mentored students during Google Code-in.
Our community was invited to send two delegates to the GSoC Tenth Year Reunion event held in lieu of the annual mentor summit. We selected Angela Byron from Canada, one of our top GSoC Drupal alumni, and Chandan Singh from India, one of our best students from this summer. Angie's story of beginning with Drupal’s Quiz module as a GSoC student almost ten years ago and becoming one of the most important people in our community is now legendary. We're also excited about Chandan becoming a rockstar developer pushing Drupal to the next level as a promising new contributor. Beginning by leading development of the Entity Embed module as a GSoC 2014 student, Chandan continues to be actively involved in Drupal 8 core development, became one of our essential mentors in GCI 2014, and has returned to GSoC 2015 as a mentor.
A big thanks to all the students and mentors who helped make this summer a success and of course to the entire Drupal community for their amazing support. Last but certainly not least, thanks to Google for making it all possible. The entire open source community is forever in debt to the gift Google provides us with Summer of Code.
It's never too early to start planning for next year's Code-in or Summer of Code. Join our GSoC group on drupal.org, our GCI group on drupal.org, and chat with us via IRC in #drupal-google on Freenode to learn more.
by Matthew Lechleider, Drupal's GSoC Org Admin
