Dreamwidth Studios

Web Page: http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Summer_of_code

Mailing List:

Dreamwidth Studios is a social media web site where people from all over the world come together to build, create, write about what's important to them, you name it. Furthermore, we're the kind of site where we actually have principles and we stand by them, even if it's inconvenient. We are building a site that people care about.

Projects

• Dreamwidth - Improving the Polling System PLUS Usability Study The goal of this project is to fix some issues with the poll system, already specified by Dreamwidth users, and to improve it. Also, in parallel, a usability study will be conducted, focused on the polling system, but also on other components of Dreamwidth.
• Dreamwidth calendar There are plenty of calendars like desktop clients or the on-line ones, but I'd like the Dreamwidth one to be unusual. The calendar should be used – so it should be intuitive, practical. The calendar should be personal – so it should be configurable. And the DwCalendar should be not another calendar – so I'd like it to be created with a lot of cooperation of Dreamwidth Members, I'd like it to hold concepts that would give it its own personality.
• iDreamwidth - Mobile Client for Dreamwidth for iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad A mobile client for the Dreamwidth platform, this application allows users of Dreamwidth to access their accounts from their favored Apple mobile product. Notable features include the ability to log into and move between multiple user accounts easily, read and write posts to Dreamwidth communities, and cache posts for reading even when offline. The application will be open sourced and submitted for release on the Apple App Store by the end of Google's Summer of Code.
• Rich Text Editor Overhaul / WAI-ARIA improvements I hate the current RTE, and indeed most of them -- which makes me perfect to find one for Dreamwidth! Because RTEs have bothered me for so long, I wouldn't stop until it was perfect. On the other hand, accessibility is part of my design philosophy, but I've never worked with it on this level before. (What I have done is write semantic code, provide thorough alt text descriptors or genuinely alternative text, and write CSS for screen-readers.) This is a challenge I would love to accept.
• Usage and business statistics The purpose of this project is to build on the existing statistics system to give detailed usage and business statistics for Dreamwidth, and to create a front-end to display this information graphically using the GD Graph library.