Blog: Summer Of Code

Understand the Application Process, Find a Mentor, and Learn More This Thursday

We're taking Summer of Code local to university students in Washington, DC. On Thursday we're hosting an event on Google's Summer of Code for Drupal for students interested in participating this year. Past and future participants will be on hand to talk more about Drupal and Google's Summer of Code and to guide students through the application process. Specifically, we'll

• Walk through the application process and deadlines, and give  tips on how to get your project accepted
• Help pair students with potential mentors who are experts in areas they want to work in
• Discuss your project ideas and give feedback, and discuss ideas coming from the community

Come out on Thursday, March 20 at 4:00 pm to learn more. I know it's short notice, but the deadlines are coming up fast and the faster you move the more likely your project will be sponsored. We're at 1534 U Street NW, Suite 2 and the closest metro is U Street Cardoza on the green line. Map

If you're looking for a summer internship that will give you the
chance to lead a programming project, work with some of the best open
source developers out there, and make a little money, then you should
look into Google's Summer of Code.
This prestigious program has turned out some very innovative projects
over the past three years and has really helped move forward open
source platforms like Drupal. This year Google will sponsor several projects for Drupal (last year it was 20).

These projects turned out some really great new functionality for Drupal last year and had many local participants - mentors and students. It will be great to get even more local students involved this year.

If you have any questions, email me or post your questions here. See you on Thursday!

New Flexible Aggregator for Drupal Ready for Use

After being in development for about seven months, we released FeedAPI 1.0 nearly two weeks ago! This is really exciting for me and everyone else who has been craving a more flexible aggregator for Drupal.

We wanted FeedAPI to be as flexible and as fast as possible, and I'm happy to say that the end result has reached those goals. All feeds are represented by nodes. Feed items remain independent from the node system - you can choose, whether you would like to store them as nodes or fast flat database records. Per default, FeedAPI is configured to use SimplePie as a feed parser, which works perfectly in most cases. But if you have particular requirements, you can switch to the alternative Common Syndication parser or write your own.

A particularity nice thing about FeedAPI is that you can configure your feed processing preferences on a per content type basis. Cron processes are performance optimized and work on a time limit rather than a number of feeds limit - a big relief for tuning cron performance. FeedAPI also collects important statistics for monitoring wicked huge aggregating sites. Additionally, FeedAPI has a straightforward configuration and is easily extensible through an API. (Just to know: The content-type preset (among others) is entirely Alex's concept and work, and Jose did a lot to make FeedAPI faster.)

In the near future, we plan to further tune FeedAPI's performance and make it more feature-rich (as I type this blog entry, we are working on committing new features that aren't included in 1.0 :) )

For now, I'd like to share with you what you can do with FeedAPI 1.0:

• Install it on a PHP4 or PHP5 site with a MySQL or a PostgreSQL database
• Cache feed downloading to save bandwidth and time
• Turn feed items into nodes
• Turn feed items into lightweight items – use FeedAPI like the good old core aggregator
• Adjust cron processing of feeds based on elapsed time. No more php timeouts
• Get statistics about feed processing
• With Feed Element Mapper, map feed item elements to CCK fields or taxonomy
• Import your feeds from anywhere with OPML import
• Export OPML
• Inherit taxonomy and organic group settings from feeds to feed items
• Views support, having a predefined views for exploring feed items for a specific feed
• Content-type based configurable presets
• Promote items to the front page according to your settings
• 1-click feed creating block. Just supply the feed url and the feed is created
• Purge or not purge outdated feed items – it's your choice
• Automate tests (simpletest module yeay!) - easy checking for problems on your installation.
• Auto-detect feed URL, you do not have to know the RSS/ATOM link, you can just supply the site URL, for example http://drupal.org
• Access to a documented API, you can write parsers or processors and use FeedAPI’s power in feed management
• Ready-to-translate .po files in the package
• +1: low turnaround time issue queue-based support :D

Beta Version of the FeedAPI Module Ready for Use

This summer I created an aggregation API for Drupal as part of Google’s Summer of Code project. The module I wrote - called FeedAPI – has functionalities that will be of interest to both end users and developers. The module serves as a general purpose aggregation module that’s able to behave like the classic core aggregator or like Leech (among others), and it allows users to create feeds and view items easily. However the main concept behind the project will be of most interest to developers. The module allows feeds to be processed by various parsers and processors, and the API supports all types of feeds and feed item representation.

The FeedAPI module is in beta version, and with the exception of some bugs filed in the Drupal issue queue that I need to address, it’s ready to be used. To see what the module can do, I recommend that you watch the screencast and visit the live demo site.

You can find the latest package of the module here. I encourage developers to check out the developers’ guide and want to thank those in advance who test it out (and special applause for those who give feedback!).

Pop Quiz: If you watch the screencast attentively, you’ll see one already reported bug. Can you spot it?

New Developments in Drupal’s SMS Framework

We’ve made some major progress recently on Drupal's new SMS Framework sponsored by Google Summer of Code. So far I've completed an SMS email gateway implementation and a filter module that introduces some interesting functionality to Drupal. I did a short demo at the July Washington DC Drupal meet-up but wanted to share the progress with everyone outside DC too.

This screencast shows what the new functionality can do.

Major Progress for the FeedAPI Module

Aron Novak has spent the past few weeks hard at work developing a new and improved aggregator module for Drupal as part of Google’s Summer of Code. The FeedAPI module takes on the common tasks of the most popular existing aggregator modules and has an API to extend it or tweak it to your needs. The hope is for this module to become the foundation for all future aggregator modules in Drupal, and allow other modules to just plug in to it to add new functionalities.

This module is in a hot phase of development right now, and all input is highly appreciated. So please check it out and give Aron your input.

Building an SMS framework to integrate with Drupal

Considering the technology is 15 years old, text messaging is sadly lacking in its ability to integrate with other applications. Luckily that’s about to get easier, and it’s long overdue.

This summer Will White is developing a framework that allows sms functionality to easily integrate with Drupal as part of Google’s Summer of Code. By the end of the summer, he’ll have created a driver-based API that works with common sms service providers and syncs with Drupal core and contributed modules. This means the hottest open source content management system will soon have the best sms integration, and everyone with a Drupal website can take advantage of it.