The 2010 Google Summer of Code Has Come to an End

August 16, two weeks ago already, marked the end of the coding period for this year's incarnation of the Google Summer of Code. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank our students, Stan, Vlad, Adeka and Tim, for their hard work and dedication. It's been a long, productive summer and the team will be working hard to finish and polish up the new features. Look for them in one of the upcoming releases.

Socnet project

Randy adds: I am pleased to announce that the student who was chosen to create the Geeklog Social Networking plugin (Socnet), Stan Palatnik, has successfully passed the Google Summer of Code requirements and is well on the way to a first Alpha version for general testing by the Geeklog community. Stan put in a summer full of patching Geeklog core, testing core, and Socnet plugin development. Not all of those tasks are easy and not all are terribly exciting. However Stan persevered and has developed a framework for social networking and securing of content as was described on the GSoC project wiki page.

Now, there are some loose Socnet ends to tie up, and Stan is trying his best to complete those tasks before he heads off to University in September. I would like to congratulate Stan on his achievement and I would ask that the Geeklog community also give a big thanks to not only Stan, but all of the participating GSoC students this year.

Calendar plugin

Vinny adds: Out of a large field of submissions to create a new calendar plugin for Geeklog, Vlad Voicu's GSoC proposal was chosen. He has worked diligently all Summer, and has a lot to show for that effort. In the next few weeks an alpha release of the new Calendar plugin will be available here on geeklog.net. The biggest features that have been repeatedly requested for the Geeklog calendar that Vlad implemented in his design are recurring events and multiple calendars. Personally, I'm looking forward to using the new calendar. Congratulations and thanks to Vlad on his great work!

Cross-site publication project

Dirk adds: The goals of GSoC are to introduce students to open source, to find new members for the open source community, and to get the organizations involved in GSoC some useful new features for their software. With social networking, calendar, and configuration improvements covering some of the often requested new features, there was room again this year for a more experimental project. Tim Patrick already submitted a very interesting proposal last year that he came back to this year in expanded form. The Cross-site publication and alert system is a bit hard to describe - maybe "Atom feeds on steroids with some P2P thrown in for good measure" will give you an idea. It turned out to be a very ambitious project but Tim managed to get the basic functionality up and running. What's missing now is a bit of polish in the user interface. It may take a little longer to get this into a Geeklog release, but it does have a solid - and working - foundation and I'm looking forward to being able to send stuff back and forth between sites.

Once again, congrats to our students - good work!