Sunday, June 9, 2013

Just before KickOff

This blog is the place  I will use to gradually report what I have done during the summer. While I will probably skip information about my lunch I will post on the progress of my Google Summer of Code project.

Lets start with a nice introduction on the organization. I think the official website has a better intro than I could write so:
"Geeklog is an open source application for managing dynamic web content. It is written in PHP and supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, or MS SQL as the database backend.

"Out of the box", Geeklog is a CMS, or a blog engine with support for comments,trackbacks, multiple syndication formats, spam protection, and all the other vital features of such a system.

The core Geeklog distribution can easily be extended by the many community developed plugins and other add-ons to radically alter its functionality. Available plugins include forums, image galleries, and many more."


Geeklog sadly did not get into GSoC officialy this year, but thanks to The Fedora Project they still got one spot. Which btw makes me feel a whole lot of pressure.

"Fedora is a fast, stable, and powerful operating system for everyday use built by a worldwide community of friends. It's completely free to use, study, and share."

There is a lot more to learn about both Fedora and Geeklog that I copied here, and I would encourage You to do so.

I hope that the next blog entry will contain more blocks of code than words, but this is the community bounding period, in which to be honest I did not offer my best performance. In my defense however it is the Final exam period on my university and I did have 4 exams in 4 days,with one more pending.

Well I did not write a whole lot but I have been reading the mailing list, actually several of them. What I have learned is that the Geeklog community is really great and patient. And as this project does frighten me from time to time the patient part is very important. After all we, or I am a student,bound to make a few mistakes now and there. Not to broadcast the wrong idea here, I do have cold feet but I am looking forward to having a lot of fun, learning and hopefully producing a great plugin this summer.

My project
In one sentence: "A plug-in for the Geeklog CMS which would enable users to submit translations".
A really detailed explanation of the project is inside my proposal.
It will try to build a plug-in which will allow the CMS users to do translations for the CMS. It should help maintain and improve the current 30+ translations Geeklog's UI has and add some new ones to the mix.
It will also allow users to make their own, private translation, I am not sure how much Geeklog would use this but if You want you would be able to go ahead do a translation to say Vulcan.

What I did so far
I am laying down the groundwork, under the guidance of Dirk Haun, the mobile presenter .
First I got my very own code repository, which I look forward to filling. Then I had to get down with the basics of Mercurial. To make my life a bit easier I decided to use TortoiseHg for as a interaction tool with the repo.
The next step for me was to make sure  I have all the right tools on all the OS running on my laptop. OK that sounded a bit ambiguous, I have 3 systems so it is not quite the hard work but still...

I got done some reading on the Geeklog wiki, and probably will do a lot more. But If You are new to Geeklog and think it is worth Your time this might be a good place to start.

During the day, or tomorrow I will go ahead and make my own minimal plugin, probably something easy and funny just to get started. (Change all the occurrences of "CMS" on a page to "sandwich" ?)

So my setup for the summer is Windows 7/Ubuntu 12.04.02/Fedora 18 with Wamp/Xampp and sublime text 2. And of course Google for when I hit a great brick wall.


Again looking forward to a great summer. And I hope to justify the trust I got from Geeklog.


Unrelated stuff
I don't remember this happening last year but this year the GSoC mailing list got a thread about unsatisfied students. While I do understand the need for feedback and the unpleasantness of not getting accepted I do think I it is not the best thing to publicly write about how the chosen student sucks in comparison to the rejected. (No I have not been mentioned but still..) I do not claim to know on what the exact selection procedure is,but logic implies that the org will pick someone they see more fit to complete the job-given it is in the org's interest to have the job done.




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