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

Submitted by SigurdMagnusson on December 21, 2007 - 1:05am

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.

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Joomla! Tasks

Submitted by Elin (not verified) on December 21, 2007 - 6:05am.
Nice piece! GHOP is a great program. We at Joomla! made a decision prior to the start to give a minimum of two weeks for student tasks, which is a lot longer than the other projects but reflects the more challenging nature of the tasks we have offered. We are thrilled at the pace at which tasks have come in and the amazingly high quality of the work received. Anyone interested should check our ghop forum (http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/board,...) for itemse with check marks (completed) or exclamation points (work submitted and under discussion). We welcome everyone to jump into the discussion of tasks and give feed back to the students.

Joomla! GHOP

Submitted by AmyStephen on December 21, 2007 - 10:30am.

You might have noticed that I have not blogged on OpenSourceCommunity.org, either. :P We have been a bit busy - RC4 came out Wednesday - we had a bug smashing weekend - and the GHOP response was so much more positive than we ever anticipated.

Quickly, then I have to go back to the contestants, but Joomla! has 133 tasks defined. 28 are closed and 28 are available. If you are a math whiz, then you'll already know that means 77 tasks are open and underway.

That's 77 different people building 77 unique things - some examples include a Flickr integration; Turkish Installation Manual; DTD for XML installers; a video of how to recover your admin password; a musical composition in celebration of the Joomla! community - all at once - all requiring pointers to documentation - answers to questions - validation of work - all at a very busy time for our community - all at a very busy time of year.

Google rocks for supporting our open source projects - and people will be unbelievablely blown away with what these students produce. It's well worth the hours and hours and hours it is taking and an honor to be a part.

Thanks for sharing what we are doing, Bryan - much appreciated! We'll try to find a bit of time to update people. Pulling together information for an update is *my* job on our GHOP team and I have failed on getting that done for a second update. No excuse.
Amy :)

http://OpenSourceCommunity.org

n/a

Statistics of GHOP

Submitted by Wilco Jansen (not verified) on December 21, 2007 - 10:43am.
For those who want to see the impressive stats from this great Google program go look at http://opentouch.info/tmp/ghop/ghop-stat...

Someone else to thank

Submitted by Bryan on December 21, 2007 - 9:43pm.

Hi Amy, this piece was written by SilverStripe's Sigurd Magnusson. I think it's pretty cool for Sigurd (thanks Sigurd!) to have also included the other projects in hopes of "getting students involved with open source" no matter which project benefits from the work. In my mind, it really shows that the open source community can be defined beyond the boundaries of a single project.

My thanks to Amy and other Joomla! folks for catching the rest of us on the latest for their project. I really want to hear from the Plone folks on how their students and project is doing in the contest. We don't get to hear from you to often!