Google High School contest helps SilverStripe, Drupal, Joomla! and Plone

In the few weeks since CMSReport wrote about the launch of the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, open source CMS projects SilverStipe, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone have been having a field day.

SilverStripe has been working hard to teach, mentor and review work by students, resulting in batch of new themes and drag-n-drop widgets available for download. A new release came out today with CMS administration translated in a variety of new languages contributed by students. They've had to double the number of challenges for students because the uptake has been so great that tasks have been completed much quicker than anticipated.

Drupal has recieved a dozen of code patches, improvements, videos and other completed tasks, and much like SilverStripe, has also been adding lots of new tasks to keep up with a real thirst for work by the students.

Joomla blogged about how brilliantly students are at following open source ettiqute, although despite an impressive list of tasks to work on, only a few have been closed. It could be that students are finding it easier to work with different projects, or are perhaps taking a Christmas break?

Based on Plone's task list, they appears to be most least popular; most tasks are still untouched by students, possibly due to the more technical nature of Python. If you're a highschooler adept at python, you've got a fantastic chance of working on Plone to get your contest money and Google Tshirts!

With more than half of the contest still to go, it seems to be working very well at getting students involved with open source to the benefit of the projects involved.