Earlier this year, WordPress was accepted as one of 190 mentoring organizations for Google Summer of Code 2014. This year marks the 10th annual GSoC and WordPress’ 7th year participating in the program. Five students have been accepted and will soon begin work on some exciting projects:
- Arian Allenson M. Valdez — Working on GlotPress UI and profiles with Yoav Farhi and Marko Heijnen as mentors
- Gautam Gupta — Working on bbPress improvements with John James Jacoby and Stephen Edgar as mentors
- Janneke Van Dorpe — Working on front-end editing/content blocks with Gregory Cornelius and Aaron Jorbin as mentors
- Nick Halsey — Working on adding custom menus to the customizer with Erick Hitter and Konstantin Obenland as mentors
- Varun Agrawal — Working on SupportPress as a plugin with Ian Dunn, Aaron Campbell, and Alex Mills as mentors
The students selected to participate are all very talented and enthusiastic. In fact, several of them are already active in contributing to WordPress core and have several plugins hosted in the directory.
GSoC 2014 kicks off May 19th when the students will begin their summer coding adventures. In the meantime, they will be bonding with their mentoring teams and working to nail down the scope of their projects. Jen Mylo, who is coordinating WordPress’ involvement in the GSoC, will be working with the teams to set up some livestreamed prototype demos at midterm. Students will also be posting on a weekly basis and we’ll be following the progress on their projects throughout the summer.
Happy to see bbPress improvements among the projects with a student! Also cool to see the attempt to open source SupportPress in the form of a plugin. For those that don’t know, SupportPress is what is used to manage the plugin queue/review system.
Also glad to see Janneke Van Dorpe receive the guidance of two great mentors. Hopefully, the work and mentor ship will lead to a possible merging of Front End Editor with WordPress 4.0.