GSoC/GCI Archive
GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Summer of Code 2013

WordPress

Web Page: http://codex.wordpress.org/GSoC2013

Mailing List: http://lists.automattic.com/mailman/listinfo/wp-hackers

WordPress is a PHP-based open source (GPLv2) web publishing platform that has been around for 10 years. The project currently has hundreds of contributing developers, and is the most popular open source CMS powering websites today. WordPress is translated into over 70 languages, and is used by over 70 million people around the world to publish web content. In addition to our web app, we will also accept applications for projects related to our mobile apps (iOS, Blackberry, Android, Nokia, Windows Mobile), community tools like GlotPress, as well as specialized themes and plugins we can use to power our sites at WordPress.org and/or WordCamp.org. We have more than 20 mentors pulled from the core contributor community ready to mentor GSoC projects this year.

We are most interested in working with students who are already familiar with the WordPress codebase, and will give preference to those who have submitted at least one core patch or created one plugin for the wordpress.org plugin repository. This helps us ensure that no time will be lost at the beginning of the project to learning the basic coding practices in WordPress, and that you'll know you enjoy working with our code and community. If you haven't submitted code in these ways before, you are encouraged to do so before submitting your application, even if it is only a trivial patch or plugin.

Note: We ask that our students produce a functioning project by midterm, so the second half of gsoc can be spent on testing, revision, ui improvements, and integration with core, if it turns out well. Please plan your timeline accordingly. 

 

Things to get you started:

  • Our ideas page on our own Codex (includes list of potential mentors).
  • Our developer mailing list, wp-hackers.
  • Our active development cycle blog: Make/Core.
  • Our official announcements blog at wordpress.org.
  • Our Trac, for tracking all development tickets (currently working on milestone 3.6).
  • Our developement IRC channel at irc.freenode.net, channel #wordpress-dev.
  • Our GSoC-specific IRC channel at irc.freenode.net, channel #wordpress-gsoc.
  • Our application template.

 We're very much looking forward to your proposal. To increase your chances in this competitive environment, it is recommended that you run your project idea past the developer community and/or specific potential mentors in IRC *before* you apply to get feedback that can improve your application's chances. 

 

Projects

  • Code Revisions Project to add WordPress native revisions to the theme and plugin code editors. The idea is to make use of WordPress core functionality and not adding new complexity.
  • Enhance Profiles.WordPress.org Although WordPress.org has been enhanced both design-wise and feature-wise, profiles.wordpress.org did not see much love. Being a plugin developer and a core contributor, I would personally love to interact with the other developers, without feeling the need of leaving the .org ecosystem.
  • JSON REST API At the moment, the only real API to access WP content is the XML-RPC API. This requires a full suite of parsing tools and is less than optimal for most users. In the past, XML parsing (usually with libxml) has caused problems on mobile platforms, which are the main consumers of the API. A JSON REST API removes much of this complexity by using a simpler serialisation format (JSON) with a protocol usable by most of the web via standard HTTP verbs.
  • Port WordPress for WebOS to Firefox OS WordPress for webOS is a great app built with web technologies for the WebOS platform. Several new web-centric mobile platforms are springing up and it would be great for WordPress to have a presence on each. This project aims to take the webOS app and convert it to run on one of these new platforms: Firefox OS. The application's code would be developed in a manner which would allow the easy conversion of the application to other platforms as well.
  • WordPress mobile app for BlackBerry 10 devices create a native mobile app to allow the users to access and manage their WordPress-powered blog(s) wherever they want whenever they need, without needing a pc and a browser, but just through their smartphones.