Drupal is our featured Google Summer of Code organization this week. A long time Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in mentoring organization, they worked with 12 students last summer.
Hi, we're Drupal, a PHP-based content management system powering roughly 2% of all websites on the Internet and we participated in Google Summer of Code 2015 (GSoC) with a dozen projects! We have participated in 10 out of 11 years and this is no easy accomplishment. It is the dedication of each and every student who inspire us to volunteer our time year after year. Every GSoC excites us as we discover the next generation of programmers who will hopefully integrate themselves within our community.
Student work was focused on porting common modules to Drupal 8 (our newest version). Drupal 8 is a major change from a coding and systems architecture point of view, forcing students to resolve advanced logic issues on their own. Not only did students learn best practices of Drupal, but they adapted our new core technologies Symfony2 and Twig. Below is a list of our projects completed in GSoC 2015.
- Lucian Hangea aka lhangea: Making Drupal smarter by learning from users’ behavior - provided a general framework to conduct experiments for advanced AI usages in Drupal by using a class of algorithms called multi-armed bandit algorithms which use reinforcement learning to display content variations based on user behavior.
- Palash Vijay aka Palashvijay4O: Port Quick Tabs module to Drupal 8 - updated module to newest version providing an easy way to render tabs using Ajax as blocks of content.
- Abhishek Kumar aka abhishek.kumar: Content Staging Solution for Drupal 8 - managed the transfer of content between sites based on CouchDB Replication Protocol in Drupal 8 with simple admin user interface plus command line options in Drush.
- Sachini Herath aka sachini: Linked Data mapping tool for Drupal 8 and the Google Knowledge Graph - allows site builders to map their content to Freebase and WikiData from Drupal 8 with two options: 1. Map entity types such as nodes and taxonomy terms with Knowledge Graph. 2. Map content created using built-in WYSIWYG editor to Knowledge Graph.
- Shivanshu Agrawal aka shivanshuag: Extending Site Audit and porting to Drupal 8 - updated an analysis platform that generates reports with actionable best practice recommendations in Drupal 8 plus implemented additional tests requested by top development agencies already familiar with the system who were surveyed by the student during proposal research.
- Prateek Mehta aka prateekmehta: URL Embed Module for Drupal 8 - built a framework for CKEditor allowing users to display an embedded representation of a URL. Content of the URL can be video, images, rich text or a link.
- Viktor Bán aka banviktor: Port Security Review to Drupal 8 - port new version of this module that helps site administrators automate testing for many of the easy-to-make mistakes that render your site insecure and create new tests to verify current best practices in security.
- Alok Pandey aka zealfire: Port Print Module to Drupal 8 - update module to newest version utilizing APIs made available in Drupal 8 to make the architecture more stable and pre-processing of node's content into more robust printable formats.
Growth is critical to any community and we're proud that three of our 2014 students returned in 2015. In addition, student-alumni continue to become mentors after graduation and we're thrilled to see alumni-mentors returning annually who ultimately push this cycle of innovation forward. Most specifically, Drupal was lucky to find Chandan Singh aka cs_shadow who went from student to mentor and recently became our backup organization administrator. The system works!
A tip to mentoring organisations: utilize an org admin who does not mentor any specific project yet overlooks all projects with all students in a weekly check-in meeting. It was clear after the first and second weeks that our check-in meeting was effective. A few students needed a bit of guidance when it came to summarizing work and providing code to review (working with every student is a full time job in itself). However, by the end of summer students provided professional weekly reports that project managers in a real job would love to review. Plus students were able to share resources and peer review each other's work in meetings. Win win.
Thank you to Google for making all of this happen. It is exciting to watch this program grow and we're already planning for 2016. Learn more about contributing with us specifically at https://groups.drupal.org/google-summer-code or help us prepare for Google Code-in at https://groups.drupal.org/google-code-in.
By Matthew Lechleider, Drupal Org Admin
