GSoC Brainstorming

New Ideas

These are new and not fully fleshed-out ideas for the Google Summer of Code. Please note that these ideas are not directly eligible for GSoC as they are. They can be used as the starting point for a proper proposal, though, or for your inspiration if you'd like to submit a project idea of your own.

• Integrate Aloha Editor, replacing FCKeditor as the "advanced" (WYSIWYG) editor in Geeklog.
  As discussed, this is probably not enough work to keep a student busy for 3 months. For a proper GSoC project, this would need to be expanded.
• Go Semantic Web. This is somewhat vague: Use available build blocks such as Apache Stanbol (see Report from the IKS Workshop in Amsterdam) and the Aloha editor (see Semantic Editor) to add semantic information to articles. Possible uses: SEO, better linking between articles (also see What's Related). Student should have a better idea of what "semantic web" is than the author of these sentences ...
• Install Script Improvements: The install script already does a lot more than simply install Geeklog. It is also used for upgrades and can help in migrating your Geeklog site from one server to another (MySQL only, though). Here's a couple of ideas of what else it could do:
  • Site Migration for PostgreSQL and/or MS SQL
  • Database Migration: Switch from Postgres to MySQL or MS SQL or the other way around
  • Character Set Conversion: Say you initially set up your Geeklog site to use ISO-8859-1 (or some other character set) and want to switch to UTF-8 now. All the content would have to be converted.
  • ... and lots of small improvements that could be made:
    • better error reporting on install problems (also: debugging, mostly for developers)
    • more specific and more conservative checks and recommendations for file and directory permissions
    • let the user continue with installation even when certain files/directories are not writable: disable the feature that needs it, but finish the installation (where possible)
    • not sure if this is really a good idea but maybe the install script could even offer to try and set read/write permissions as required
    • build install/admin/info.php into the install script
    • proper HTML title tags in the install script (they're always the same)
    • a technicality: the plugin upload from within Geeklog uses the unpacker class, while the install script only relies on the PEAR Tar and Zip packages, so you may not be able to add some plugin archives in the install script
    • add a "maintenance" option at the end of the install or upgrade process where we could offer (re)setting certain options, e.g. when a default changed
    • allow for localized install data (currently, a fresh setup is always in English, with English default stories, preferences, etc.)
• E-Mail Subsystem: Geeklog sometimes has to send out a lot of emails. Instead of sending them all at once (and running into timeouts), we could queue them and send them out in batches. This queue should allow for other job types as well.
• Multi-site Setup: Run several websites off of one codebase. There's a hack for that, but it's a pain for upgrades.
• Staging Support: When making significant changes to a site, you don't want to do those on your "live" site, possibly disrupting its service. So you would set up a second site with pretty much the same setup as the original and make the changes there first. How could Geeklog (possibly the install script?) support such a setup? E.g. syncing changes back and forth.
• Admin toolbox: A collection of mini-plugins for admin tasks (e.g. reset stats, change a default setting for all users, etc.). Should have super easy install, e.g. just drop (upload?) a file in a predefined directory.
• Migration from/to other systems is always a hot topic. How could we make that easier?
• Multi user blogs: Geeklog can handle blogs of several users, actually, if you give one topic to a user then it is almost unlimited. There are a few existing discussions on the forum and also feature requests concerning the improvement of user blogs. E.g. read only topics, using GL for a large site with many users. Basically it is a native function of GL but it need some improvement.
• Add shopping cart and/or e-commerce functionality to Geeklog (in the form of a plugin). Using an existing open source shopping cart or e-commerce web application would probably be a good idea, but the result should be fully integrated with Geeklog's security model (related forum discussion)

Leftover Ideas

This is a list of other ideas for projects for the Google Summer of Code that have been tossed around in previous years but did not seem so important at this point in time.

• WebDAV API
• Google Translation API
• Implement Open Web Analytics
• Implement a theme based on the YUI CSS Foundation Libraries

If you plan to apply for one of these projects you should provide a good use case. Otherwise, these ideas could serve as a starting point for your own project idea.