If you’re involved with the WordPress project, chances are you already know that at about this time every year, the WordPress guys announce a series of projects for the Google Summer Of Code which is an annual event aimed at providing accepted students the chance to work with Mentors for their favorite participating open source project where they gain exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits.
This years round of projects that students can place applications for are as follows:
- BuddyPress
- Media
- Blog Import/Export
- User Roles
- Template Versioning
- MPTT
- Search
- Video
- Theme Frameworks
- Community/Event Organizing Framework
- WordPress MU
- Other
Those who are interested in more information regarding the projects and who is mentoring them can find all of the information on the official Codex articled dedicated to Google Summer Of Code 2009.
Overall, I’m hoping that at least a few of these projects are accomplished over the course of the project as many of them would benefit the software greatly such as search, media, and blog import/exporting. While I don’t have any code fu to participate in the event, the projects themselves I believe can be used as a way to figure out what is in the core developers heads in terms of where the project is heading.
Out of the project listed, the ones that I’m most interested in is the theme versioning system. Like post revisions, theme revisions would work in much the same way, saving a revision of the template with each save. A system like this would probably make people a little less afraid to venture into the theme editor to make changes to their css file or core theme files since you would be able to revert a change.
Community/Event Orginizing Frameworks would be pretty cool. For example, the official WordCamp site could use a framework such as this where WordCamp orginizers can have a subdomain similar to how WordPress.com works but they have all the tools they need built into the site to handle registration, planning, sponsorships, event location, etc.
What about you? Anything in the list of projects that screams out at you?