Plone and Google Summer of Code

By Matthew Wilkes, Plone Google Summer of Code Organization Adminstrator

Following our wonderfully successful participation in the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, the Plone Foundation was looking forward to some larger projects that would benefit the community. We certainly weren't disappointed. After months of dedicated mentoring, the Plone project is very happy to report that our four Summer of Code projects are now complete.

Javier Mansilla was raring to go with his Plone Batch editing project, providing screenshots of his initial work along with his request for commit rights. This culminated in him presenting his work at the Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre conference in Argentina. The level of community involvement of the students was a particular highlight with both Florian Friesdorf (working on new authentication systems) and Martin Lundwall (zope.component introspector for Plone), both participating in multiple sprints for some face to face collaboration with their mentor and other students. On the deployment side of things, Kenneth Miller has been working on making Plone installations easier to customise with his Buildout Builder project. Buildout Builder allows non-technical users to manipulate zc.buildout based Python environments through a slick graphical user interface.

We're quite excited to bring you this report. Many thanks to all of our mentors and students for making Summer of Code 2008 a success for the Plone project!