Joomla! Documentation™

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Welcome!

Welcome to the Joomla! Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2012 project ideas page. As we move forward with the 2012 version of the Joomla! GSoC, we will use this page to develop possible project ideas. Please note that anyone who is interested can participate in this process. You do not have to be a GSoC student or mentor to suggest possible project ideas. Thanks!

Discussion of ideas and other GSoC related items is welcome on our Google Group: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/joomla-gsoc-2012

Ideas

Opportunities exist for students to work with projects from either the Joomla CMS, the Joomla Platform or in some cases a combination of both.

In addition to this ideas list, the Joomla! Community is able to voice their opinion on features they would like to see via the Joomla! Idea Pool. Those wishing to add ideas to this listing are encouraged to review the Idea Pool and base their idea on the input received there.

Joomla CMS

Source Code Developer Mailing List

Project: Social Package

Brief explanation: Over the last several years, social media has become a dominant force in online media. Based on the number of extensions interacting with various social media APIs, it would be logical to build a Social package for the Joomla! Platform that provides a common and simplified interface to post and retrieve data from various social media networks.

Knowledge Prerequisite: Joomla Platform, familiarity with social media APIs (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.), OAuth

Difficulty: Medium to Hard

Mentor: Michael Babker

Project: Language Installation

Create an interface to install language packs from a generated list of accredited language packs during Joomla installation and subsequently from the administrator interface, either the installer or the language manager.

Knowledge Prerequisite: Joomla Platform, JSON

Difficulty: Medium to Hard

Mentor:

Project: Joomla Translations

Brief explanation: Create a centralized translation tool, which will be a kind of Facebook Self-Translation App for Joomla! communities to have better translation.

Expected Results: The centralized website will make better translations for Joomla! It will help non-English speaking translation teams to get feedback about translation quality from people, who speak the same language. So translation teams can involve more volunteers in translation process. It will help also extension developers to translate their software. It will enable ability to submit a new extension translation INI file in English and get the translated version from the translation teams.

See

• Facebook Self-Translation
• [1]

Knowledge Prerequisite: PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, Joomla! Framework

Difficulty: Medium

Mentor: Edvard Ananyan

Project: CMS Unit Testing

Brief explanation: The Joomla CMS has its own set of classes that augment the Joomla platform but these are not well tested. The goal of this project is to improve the code coverage by writing unit tests for library classes specific to the Joomla CMS.

Expected Results: The student will be expected to review the current code coverage for the Joomla CMS libraries (/libraries/cms) and write and agreed-upon number of unit tests with particular attention to packages and classes that are below 50% coverage.

Knowledge Prerequisite: PHP, PHPUnit

Difficulty: Medium

Mentor:

Project: Add Article Image support to Core Content Modules

Brief explanation: Joomla 2.5.x ships with several core content modules. These modules can display article lists or links. However they do not support bringing in article images. This project would be to make some minor code updates to all the core content modules to add article image support and parameters. Some basic parameters would be to show / hide the article image, specify a thumbnail size, enable or disable article links on the image, and whether or not to respect the image's proportion when resized as a thumbnail.

Expected Results: The student will be expected to modify and update Joomla's core content modules and make modifications to the multiple files in the MVC structure to add parameters, and add additional code to the module's HTML output. The module should interface with the Joomla core class JImage as well to create the thumbnail image.

Knowledge Prerequisite: PHP, Joomla! Framework

Difficulty: Easy

Mentor: Chad Windnagle

Joomla Platform

The Joomla Platform allows for ideas that can work within the Joomla CMS, or could be completely separate applications that have no connection at all. The Joomla Platform allows for applications to be built for the command line, process daemons and web services. The follow list outlines some ideas that will be immediately useful for the Joomla Platform project that a student may consider taking on. In addition to PHP libraries, the Joomla Platform also ships with Mootools and project ideas can be related to client-side operations as well as server-side.

github Source Code Developer Mailing List

All code contributions must follow Joomla coding standards and include full unit test coverage.

Project: New document types

Brief explanation: Create JCard, JCal, JCSV and other extensible classes as platform document types that will produce standards compliant documents of specific types (e.g. vCard,iCal).

Knowledge Prerequisite: Joomla Platform, XML, web standards,

Difficulty: Medium to Hard

Mentor:

Project: Platform Unit Testing

Brief explanation: The Joomla Platform has a good suite of automated Unit Tests, but code coverage is lacking in some areas. The goal of this project is to improve the code coverage by writing unit tests for the Joomla Platform.

Expected Results: The student will be expected to review the current code coverage report for the Joomla Platform and write and agreed-upon number of unit tests with particular attention to packages that are below 50% coverage. Preference should be given to non-deprecated classes but the student may choose from either the core tree (/libraries/joomla) or the legacy tree (/libraries/legacy).

Knowledge Prerequisite: PHP, PHPUnit

Difficulty: Medium

Mentor:

Platform Applications

The creation of useful platform applications that can also serve as examplars for other platform developers is a third type of project. These applications, whether web or command line based, are built on the Joomla! Platform.

Project: Joomla Platform Application Directory

Brief explanation: The Joomla project has several directory sites dedicated to extensions for the Joomla CMS (the JED) and free and commercial resources (the JRD). With the release of the Joomla Platform, and it's particular attention to allowing other types of applications (not just the CMS), there is a need for a new website to act as a directory for these applications. The goal of this project is to build a new Joomla Platform application (not a Joomla component but a full application) to serve as this directory.

Expected Results: The student will be expected to build a new web application based on JApplicationWeb and the new Universal Content Model (UCM) package loosely inline with the other Joomla directory sites (the JED and the JRD). This is expected to be a "phase 1" project where the features will include user registration (agreeing to terms) and login, simple information pages (like Joomla articles) and listing pages for Joomla Platform applications. Suitable fields will be required and should include such things as application type (command line application, daemon, web application, web service, etc), what the application does, how to get it and so forth. The student is not expected to design the final template but should look to Bootstrap for basic inspiration. Simple categorization will also be required. Global search can be added if time permits.

Knowledge Prerequisite: PHP, OOP

Difficulty: Hard but very rewarding

Mentor: Andrew Eddie