Joomla! Student Outreach Program Project Ideas

Joomla! Student Outreach Program

JSOP has been created to provide a structure to allow students to participate in and contribute to the Joomla! project. Students will work with experienced mentors on coding and other projects designed to improve the Joomla! CMS and the general Joomla! ecosystem.

This program will include two separate ways that students can contribute to Joomla! in structured programs with experienced mentors. The first way will be working on larger projects as part of a team. The team will include one or more students and one or more mentors.

Large Team Projects

Here is a starting list for possible large team projects. The idea is that these will be larger projects that would be worked on by teams of students and mentors.

If you are interested in participating in one of these projects, please add your name under Interested Mentors or Interested Students. This is not final and does not commit you to anything. It will just help us figure out who is interested in what. You can add your name to more than one project if you like and then we can decide later which project you will work on.

Improved, automated API documentation presentation

Figure out a way to read the PHP code documentation into a database and use it to allow access to accurate, up-to-date documentation of the Joomla! API in a way that is usable to developers.

Interested Mentors: Louis Landry. Chris Davenport

Interested Students:

Internationalisation of the Joomla! help screens for 1.6

Improve the process for creating and deploying the help screens in the many languages for which Joomla! is translated.

Interested Mentors: Jean-Marie Simonet

Interested Students:

System Testing

Create automated system tests to allow testing of the CMS from a user perspective.

Interested Mentors: Mark Dexter

Interested Students:

Version 1.5 to 1.6 migration script

We need to allow 1.5 users to easily migrate their sites to version 1.6. Work on this has been started, but it is a big job. Also, this could include hooks to make it easier for third-party developers to build migration tools for their extensions.

Interested Mentors: Mark Dexter

Interested Students:

Project Management Tools

This project could include:

• Develop a component with project collaboration features (like BaseCamp: http://basecamphq.com/).
• ProgressBar views based on completed task based on sprints, milestones, project...
• Different front-end views for Clients, Team, Managers...
• A module to show the active projects and is respective ProgressBars.
• Allow Comments and discussions on tasks
• Allow manager/team to set the function points value of each task (eq: planing poker)

Skills needed: Joomla CMS framework, MVC, PHP, MySQL, Javascript, MooTools

Interested Mentors: Marcelo Eden

Interested Students:

Zen Joomla! template switcher

This would be capable of efficiently allowing selection from a few hundred templates. Also maybe a component for submission and processing?

Interested Mentors:

Interested Students:

Usability testing

Interested Mentors: Elin Waring

Interested Students:

Joomla Dev Tools

This is a project which automatically generate codes for you to help when developing Extensions. This will help,

• New comers to decrease the learning curve of Joomla! Development
• Professionals to automate their Joomla! tasks

more details: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dhdpnvnz_59g6n3rsc8 samples : http://code.google.com/p/arunoda/source/browse/#svn/trunk/kadira%3Fstate%3Dclosed

Interested Mentors: Oleg Nesterov

Interested Students: Arunoda Susiripala

Small Task Projects

The other part of this is that we can also have a list of small tasks that students could work on individually (like the GHOP model, for those of you familiar with this). One or more mentors could help students with these tasks. Example of tasks might be to create a unit or system test, fix a bug, or write some documentation.

Program Structure

In both cases, students would be working on a volunteer basis. However, we will figure out some fun rewards, like awarding t-shirts or other Joomla! stuff. Also, we will issue official certificates to students who successfully contribute to either program.

As with GSoC, the primary benefits to students are (a) real-world experience; (b) working with world-class mentors; and (c) the satisfaction of contributing to a great project and being part of a great community.

Application Process

Since JSOP is a volunteer program, we do not have a fixed limit on the number of students who can participate. However, we need to make sure we have mentors for each project or task. Also, we still want students to formally apply to the program so that we have information about each student and can make sure they are assigned to projects. We will have more information about the details of the application process shortly.